We report an ethnographic and field-experiment-based study of time intervals in Amondawa, a Tupi language and culture of Amazonia. We analyse two Amondawa time interval systems based on natural environmental events (seasons and days), as well as the Amondawa system for categorising lifespan time (“age”). Amondawa time intervals are exclusively event-based, as opposed to time-based (i.e. they are based on event-duration, rather than measured abstract time units). Amondawa has no lexicalised abstract concept of time and no practices of time reckoning, as conventionally understood in the anthropological literature. Our findings indicate that not only are time interval systems and categories linguistically and culturally specific, but that they do not depend upon a universal “concept of time”. We conclude that the abstract conceptual domain of time is not a human cognitive universal, but a cultural historical construction, semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts for time reckoning.
Vagueness in event times pertains to the observation that one usually finds it difficult to slice the continuous flux of space-time into a series of events with clear-cut temporal boundaries. I argue that such vagueness originates from our ignorance of discrete changing points wherein states of affairs begin or cease to obtain. Applying the epistemic view on vagueness (Williamson 1994) to vagueness in event times, I contend that the lagging nature of knowledge prevents one from knowing the abrupt changes taking place between contiguous minimal time intervals. In turn, vagueness in the conception of event times is construed in terms of epistemic modality (Jaszczolt 2009), viz. a gradation of a thinker’s epistemic certainty towards the occurrence of a physical change.
This chapter investigates the encoding of temporal information in aspect, and how that information may shift based on contextual factors. Analyzing these shifts leads to a more complex view as to how temporal information in a sentence or a discourse results from meaning composition than standardly assumed.
This chapter addresses the question posed in these volumes of the interrelationship of time and space. It contrasts the view that the concept of space structures that of time with the alternative that there is a close relationship between time and epistemic modality. Focusing on metaphors, the chapter argues that casting events as physical objects located in positions around Ego, i.e. an individual at the deictic centre, allows the degree to which Ego can physically interact with the event-objects to be inferred. It is argued that mental interaction can be metaphorically cast as physical interaction and consequently the location of an event allows the degree of epistemic detachment from the event (a modal concept) to be determined.
This chapter explores the semantics and pragmatics of the Russian temporal syntactic phraseme ‘X to X’, which expresses either the speaker’s surprise at the fact that events go as planned (surprising punctuality interpretation) or the speaker’s surprise at the fact that unplanned events go as if they had been pre-planned (surprising fateful coincidence interpretation). While the construction is not unique, and occurs in other languages, its preferred interpretations are language-specific. The chapter demonstrates differences between Russian and English outlooks on time, based on their fundamental differences in linguistic worldviews. While in Russian surprising punctuality interpretation prevails, English favours the surprising fateful coincidence interpretation of this phraseme (see also Charlier, this volume on Mongolian temporality).
This chapter proposes an analysis of how a particular event – wolf hunting – is conceptualised in the Mongolian language. It aims at contributing to the ongoing debate about the interactions between potentially universal and language-specific features that shape the ways people relate to their natural environment. The analysis, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, describes and explains how a Mongolian wolf hunter experiences two modalities of temporality: cyclical and ‘evenemental’. It shows how these two modalities are embedded into the Mongolian concept of ‘wind horses’, hiimor’, in the context of wolf hunting. The actualisation of these temporalities reveals a particular perception of the environment as well as the singular moral position of an individual in it.
This chapter examines different types of time expressed in Koromu (Kesawai), a Papuan language, to show the interaction of time expressions with cultural and environmental contexts and to investigate semantic description. Meanings are explicated in a metalanguage based on semantic primitives (cf. Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2008; Gladkova, this volume). The discovery of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) temporal primes and investigation of semantic molecules, non-primitive meanings that occur within the meaning of other concepts, promotes comparative and contrastive semantic description. The finding of culture-specific concepts referring to ‘time-’ and ‘event-based’ time intervals (cf. da Silva Sinha et al., this volume), linear and cyclical time (cf. Charlier, this volume), suggests that a range of expressions need consideration when cultural perspectives are assessed.
This chapter addresses the question of universal and language- and culture-specific traits in conceptualisation of ‘time’. It tests the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) hypothesis that semantic universals time and now should be found in Russian. It demonstrates that vremja and sejčas are Russian exponents of these primes, while the close-in-meaning terms pora, teper’, and nynče are semantically complex. The chapter formulates culturally salient attitudes to time in Russian, such as ‘change’, ‘persistence’, ‘things being outside people’s control’, on the basis of the analysed words. It argues that NSM can be regarded as an effective tool in the ‘time’-related linguistic research due to its universal character.
As facets of interpreted experience, space and time are highly variable in their linguistic manifestation. Universal aspects of language structure reflect a more basic level of apprehension. Space and time have a foundational role in grammar. Objects and events, the prototypes for nouns and verbs, are primarily conceived, respectively, as spatial and temporal entities. The extensive noun-verb parallelism suggests that space and time merit unified treatment. However, certain asymmetries suggest that time has a special status. Time has multiple roles in language. It is always the medium of conceptualising activity and serves in various capacities as an object of conception. The dynamic conception of space, through time, makes possible the metaphorical conception of time itself, in terms of space.
Most linguistic and cognitive representations of space depend on frames of reference (FoRs). We show that FoRs play an equally important role in representations of the orientation of entities and representations of their location and direction of motion. We propose that orientation is conceptually encoded, not in terms of metaphorical path functions (Jackendoff 1983), but in terms of. Equipped with the notion of vectors, we introduce a distinction between two classes of FoRs: classical “angular-anchored” FoRs and the previously unrecognised “head-anchored” FoRs. In English, angular-anchored relative FoRs dominate in both locative and orientation descriptions. In contrast, in Seri and Yucatec, two indigenous languages of Mexico, object-centred angular-anchored FoRs dominate in locative descriptions, but head-anchored FoRs dominate in orientation descriptions.
The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the general discussion about conceptualisation of motion events in different languages and cultures (see also Engemann et al., HCP 36; Lewandowski, HCP 36; Filipović and Geva, this volume). This study examines how language specificities influence the way in which French and Czech native speakers talk, gesture, and think about the category of motion events. Its theoretical framework combines (1) Talmy’s verb-framed/satellite-framed language typology, (2) Whorf’s hypothesis of linguistic relativity, and (3) McNeill’s conception of gesture and speech. Analysis of verbal and gestural descriptions of motion reveals that, while there are considerable verbal differences, French and Czech gestures are far more similar than expected. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of gesture in the expression of speakers’ intentions.
We studied language as a factor in the construal of dynamic spatial relations, and addressed the question of whether different languages can have different effects on memory of motion events. In the “motion condition”, speakers had to describe what the person did in each video, while in the “colour condition”, speakers had to describe only the colours they noticed in the clips. English speakers showed better recognition of the motion event when asked to describe them directly (compared with the colour condition), and Spanish speakers performed equally on both conditions, with their performance being similar to the English speaker’s performance on the colour condition. We discuss the implications of these results for language processing and for memory of events.
This chapter explores the nonconceptual roots of spatiotemporal abilities in the context of episodic memory. Episodic memory is the conscious recollection of an autobiographical episode. We argue (a) that if episodic memory is a form of re-experiencing then it must inherit that which is necessary for something to be an experience, and (b) that this is, following Kant, spatiotemporal content, in addition to its being as of the experience of a single person. We suggest that there is no reason why these minimal conditions should not be met by children too young to be credited with concepts of time and of mentality, and report, for the first time, data we have collected in support of this view.
Since the grammar of every language can divide temporal reality in a different manner, this chapter aims to present a method of arriving at the understanding of one of its dimensions – the present – encoded in the structures of English. These structures consist of eleven temporal and aspectual constructions, which are analysed by means of Cognitive Grammar tools, namely construal aspects. To be able to make detailed observations concerning temporal reality, the author proposes to operationalise the construal aspects by ascribing specific values to them. With this approach it is possible to formulate precise conclusions concerning such facets of the present as its extent and its two boundaries – the past and future.
This chapter compares spatial constructs in mental imagery to spatial constructs in non-metaphorical and metaphorical language. The study is based on a psycholinguistic survey of people’s mental imagery for paths and roads, and a previous corpus-linguistic investigation of path- and road-instances from the British National Corpus (the BNC) (see Johansson Falck 2010). The aim is to investigate if spatial path and road constructs in mental imagery focus on similar aspects as those in metaphorical language. The study shows that mental imagery and metaphorical language are more restricted than non-metaphorical language, and typically are related to the specific anticipations for bodily action that paths and roads afford. The focus is on function, which influences both direction and manner of motion.
We report an ethnographic and field-experiment-based study of time intervals in Amondawa, a Tupi language and culture of Amazonia. We analyse two Amondawa time interval systems based on natural environmental events (seasons and days), as well as the Amondawa system for categorising lifespan time (“age”). Amondawa time intervals are exclusively event-based, as opposed to time-based (i.e. they are based on event-duration, rather than measured abstract time units). Amondawa has no lexicalised abstract concept of time and no practices of time reckoning, as conventionally understood in the anthropological literature. Our findings indicate that not only are time interval systems and categories linguistically and culturally specific, but that they do not depend upon a universal “concept of time”. We conclude that the abstract conceptual domain of time is not a human cognitive universal, but a cultural historical construction, semiotically mediated by symbolic and cultural-cognitive artefacts for time reckoning.
Vagueness in event times pertains to the observation that one usually finds it difficult to slice the continuous flux of space-time into a series of events with clear-cut temporal boundaries. I argue that such vagueness originates from our ignorance of discrete changing points wherein states of affairs begin or cease to obtain. Applying the epistemic view on vagueness (Williamson 1994) to vagueness in event times, I contend that the lagging nature of knowledge prevents one from knowing the abrupt changes taking place between contiguous minimal time intervals. In turn, vagueness in the conception of event times is construed in terms of epistemic modality (Jaszczolt 2009), viz. a gradation of a thinker’s epistemic certainty towards the occurrence of a physical change.
This chapter investigates the encoding of temporal information in aspect, and how that information may shift based on contextual factors. Analyzing these shifts leads to a more complex view as to how temporal information in a sentence or a discourse results from meaning composition than standardly assumed.
This chapter addresses the question posed in these volumes of the interrelationship of time and space. It contrasts the view that the concept of space structures that of time with the alternative that there is a close relationship between time and epistemic modality. Focusing on metaphors, the chapter argues that casting events as physical objects located in positions around Ego, i.e. an individual at the deictic centre, allows the degree to which Ego can physically interact with the event-objects to be inferred. It is argued that mental interaction can be metaphorically cast as physical interaction and consequently the location of an event allows the degree of epistemic detachment from the event (a modal concept) to be determined.
This chapter explores the semantics and pragmatics of the Russian temporal syntactic phraseme ‘X to X’, which expresses either the speaker’s surprise at the fact that events go as planned (surprising punctuality interpretation) or the speaker’s surprise at the fact that unplanned events go as if they had been pre-planned (surprising fateful coincidence interpretation). While the construction is not unique, and occurs in other languages, its preferred interpretations are language-specific. The chapter demonstrates differences between Russian and English outlooks on time, based on their fundamental differences in linguistic worldviews. While in Russian surprising punctuality interpretation prevails, English favours the surprising fateful coincidence interpretation of this phraseme (see also Charlier, this volume on Mongolian temporality).
This chapter proposes an analysis of how a particular event – wolf hunting – is conceptualised in the Mongolian language. It aims at contributing to the ongoing debate about the interactions between potentially universal and language-specific features that shape the ways people relate to their natural environment. The analysis, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, describes and explains how a Mongolian wolf hunter experiences two modalities of temporality: cyclical and ‘evenemental’. It shows how these two modalities are embedded into the Mongolian concept of ‘wind horses’, hiimor’, in the context of wolf hunting. The actualisation of these temporalities reveals a particular perception of the environment as well as the singular moral position of an individual in it.
This chapter examines different types of time expressed in Koromu (Kesawai), a Papuan language, to show the interaction of time expressions with cultural and environmental contexts and to investigate semantic description. Meanings are explicated in a metalanguage based on semantic primitives (cf. Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2008; Gladkova, this volume). The discovery of natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) temporal primes and investigation of semantic molecules, non-primitive meanings that occur within the meaning of other concepts, promotes comparative and contrastive semantic description. The finding of culture-specific concepts referring to ‘time-’ and ‘event-based’ time intervals (cf. da Silva Sinha et al., this volume), linear and cyclical time (cf. Charlier, this volume), suggests that a range of expressions need consideration when cultural perspectives are assessed.
This chapter addresses the question of universal and language- and culture-specific traits in conceptualisation of ‘time’. It tests the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) hypothesis that semantic universals time and now should be found in Russian. It demonstrates that vremja and sejčas are Russian exponents of these primes, while the close-in-meaning terms pora, teper’, and nynče are semantically complex. The chapter formulates culturally salient attitudes to time in Russian, such as ‘change’, ‘persistence’, ‘things being outside people’s control’, on the basis of the analysed words. It argues that NSM can be regarded as an effective tool in the ‘time’-related linguistic research due to its universal character.
As facets of interpreted experience, space and time are highly variable in their linguistic manifestation. Universal aspects of language structure reflect a more basic level of apprehension. Space and time have a foundational role in grammar. Objects and events, the prototypes for nouns and verbs, are primarily conceived, respectively, as spatial and temporal entities. The extensive noun-verb parallelism suggests that space and time merit unified treatment. However, certain asymmetries suggest that time has a special status. Time has multiple roles in language. It is always the medium of conceptualising activity and serves in various capacities as an object of conception. The dynamic conception of space, through time, makes possible the metaphorical conception of time itself, in terms of space.
Most linguistic and cognitive representations of space depend on frames of reference (FoRs). We show that FoRs play an equally important role in representations of the orientation of entities and representations of their location and direction of motion. We propose that orientation is conceptually encoded, not in terms of metaphorical path functions (Jackendoff 1983), but in terms of. Equipped with the notion of vectors, we introduce a distinction between two classes of FoRs: classical “angular-anchored” FoRs and the previously unrecognised “head-anchored” FoRs. In English, angular-anchored relative FoRs dominate in both locative and orientation descriptions. In contrast, in Seri and Yucatec, two indigenous languages of Mexico, object-centred angular-anchored FoRs dominate in locative descriptions, but head-anchored FoRs dominate in orientation descriptions.
The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the general discussion about conceptualisation of motion events in different languages and cultures (see also Engemann et al., HCP 36; Lewandowski, HCP 36; Filipović and Geva, this volume). This study examines how language specificities influence the way in which French and Czech native speakers talk, gesture, and think about the category of motion events. Its theoretical framework combines (1) Talmy’s verb-framed/satellite-framed language typology, (2) Whorf’s hypothesis of linguistic relativity, and (3) McNeill’s conception of gesture and speech. Analysis of verbal and gestural descriptions of motion reveals that, while there are considerable verbal differences, French and Czech gestures are far more similar than expected. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of gesture in the expression of speakers’ intentions.
We studied language as a factor in the construal of dynamic spatial relations, and addressed the question of whether different languages can have different effects on memory of motion events. In the “motion condition”, speakers had to describe what the person did in each video, while in the “colour condition”, speakers had to describe only the colours they noticed in the clips. English speakers showed better recognition of the motion event when asked to describe them directly (compared with the colour condition), and Spanish speakers performed equally on both conditions, with their performance being similar to the English speaker’s performance on the colour condition. We discuss the implications of these results for language processing and for memory of events.
This chapter explores the nonconceptual roots of spatiotemporal abilities in the context of episodic memory. Episodic memory is the conscious recollection of an autobiographical episode. We argue (a) that if episodic memory is a form of re-experiencing then it must inherit that which is necessary for something to be an experience, and (b) that this is, following Kant, spatiotemporal content, in addition to its being as of the experience of a single person. We suggest that there is no reason why these minimal conditions should not be met by children too young to be credited with concepts of time and of mentality, and report, for the first time, data we have collected in support of this view.
Since the grammar of every language can divide temporal reality in a different manner, this chapter aims to present a method of arriving at the understanding of one of its dimensions – the present – encoded in the structures of English. These structures consist of eleven temporal and aspectual constructions, which are analysed by means of Cognitive Grammar tools, namely construal aspects. To be able to make detailed observations concerning temporal reality, the author proposes to operationalise the construal aspects by ascribing specific values to them. With this approach it is possible to formulate precise conclusions concerning such facets of the present as its extent and its two boundaries – the past and future.
This chapter compares spatial constructs in mental imagery to spatial constructs in non-metaphorical and metaphorical language. The study is based on a psycholinguistic survey of people’s mental imagery for paths and roads, and a previous corpus-linguistic investigation of path- and road-instances from the British National Corpus (the BNC) (see Johansson Falck 2010). The aim is to investigate if spatial path and road constructs in mental imagery focus on similar aspects as those in metaphorical language. The study shows that mental imagery and metaphorical language are more restricted than non-metaphorical language, and typically are related to the specific anticipations for bodily action that paths and roads afford. The focus is on function, which influences both direction and manner of motion.