Abstract
Human experience of time is dynamic rather than static. While physics treats time as directionless, linguistic and cognitive representations of the present are fuzzy, context-dependent, and often extended (Jaszczolt 2009, Ismael 2016, Prosser 2016). This intuitive perception of the present has traditionally been referred to as the Specious Present (SP) in psychology (James 1890). But SP is a unit of experience lacking linguistic grounding. As a result, SP remains poorly defined, with fuzzy boundaries.
The study introduced the Conceptual Specious Present (CSP). ‘CSP can be conceptualized as a protracted present moment as concepts function at a level higher than senses and include more advanced cognitive activities, which are likely to require some time, i.e. more than a second, for their processing’ (Petrenko 2024). Therefore, CSP should be treated as a flexible, context-sensitive cognitive category.
This prompts the following research questions: (i) How is CSP explained linguistically, particularly in Russian? (ii) What linguistic and extralinguistic factors influence the duration of CSP? (iii) To what extent can CSP be protracted?
To address these questions, I recruited 65 participants to take part in a questionnaire and assess 20 scenarios from the perspective of duration.
The results show that CSP is highly variable, extending from one second to over one year depending on the context. Linguistic parameters, such as the aspect and very types, have little effect on delimiting the duration of CSP and helping explaining the patterns. Extralinguistic conventions were the most reliable predictors.