Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology.

中文翻译：

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流动的时间：涌现论和语言多样性

人类是复杂的系统，是“宏观实体”，其存在、行为和意识源于物理世界微观层面上物理实体的配置。但是，通过“追踪我们”（可以说是微观粒子）无法找到对人类行为和思维的解释。因此，在解释人类行为时，包括本文所关注的语言行为，涌现论提供了一个强大的机会来解释在该层面上到底出现了什么，同时牢记最终产品以内部和外部的形式出现。多元文化。目前，涌现论研究还存在空白。一方面，哲学界对人类现实的出现进行了讨论；另一方面，在人类学、社会学、语言学或心理学领域讨论人类这些新兴方面的社会、文化或个体差异。我在本文中所做的就是寻找一种方法来“追踪”一些此类多样化的新兴事物，从它们的“形成”的普遍性，一直到它们的多样化。我选择的新兴事物是人类时间，我的探究领域是自然语言话语，这个项目背后的驱动力是理解我们从中出现的微观层面上的时空的“真实”时间与人类设计的时间之间的联系。我们密切关注人类语言表达时间参考的压倒性多样性。主要问题是，这种多样性在哪里适合？对这种多样性以及这种多样性表面下潜藏的东西的理解是否有助于涌现论的故事？因此，我对这本关于“结构的本质和自然的结构”的贡献采用了以下标题。人类传播的结构同时是统一的、普遍的，并且与文化相关，因为它是作为人类特征而出现的，因此与微观层面在某些基本方面相关，但也可以自由飞翔特定于社会和文化的不同方向。我在这里探讨了时间的微观层面和语言反映之间的灰色地带——中间地带本身就出现了，但往往被那些从任一端探讨人类流动时间问题的人所绕过：形而上学和一方面是时间哲学，另一方面是对比语言学、人类学语言学和语言文献学。我用来自不同语系的时态和无时态语言的例子来说明这场辩论，并考虑了与时间有关的概念普遍性作为认识模态程度的可能性。不用说，以这种方式提出问题也阐明了我的（并非无懈可击的）方法论。