[lingtalks] =?X-UNKNOWN?Q?Rafael_Nu=D1ez_talk_Fri_Oct_5_4PM_=28fwd=29?=

[Sharon Rose]

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Greetings,
Rafael Nuñez has sent the following title and abstract for his presentation in 
the Linguistics Anthropology Lab, CRB 340, this Friday, Oct. 5th, at 5 PM.  All 
welcome!

With the future behind them: Linguistic and gestural evidence of spatial
construals of time in Aymara

Abstract
Humans from all over the world, speaking different languages, naturally
express (and apparently, think about) time-related events in terms of
spatial entities and properties. This phenomenon shows up in linguistic
metaphorical expressions such as (a) "we are approaching the end of the
semester," and (b) "Easter is approaching." Research in cognitive
linguistics and in processing of temporal metaphors has traditionally
distinguished between Moving-Ego conceptual metaphors, as in (a), and
Moving-Time ones, as in (b). Both of these conceptual metaphors involve time
events in reference to an Ego, which specifies the present time ³Now² where
FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. I will argue that the
picture is more complicated than that: (1) The specified bodily orientation
is not universal, and (2) not all spatial construals of time have the Ego as
reference point. In this talk--focusing on (1)-- I will provide convergent
empirical evidence (lexical-metaphorical-gestural) from my field study of
the Aymara culture of the Andes, which shows that the Aymara people operate
with an unusual PAST-IN-FRONT-OF-EGO and FUTURE-BEHIND-EGO mapping.
Implications for ³Embodiment² and bodily-grounded approaches to the
understanding of the mind will be discussed.


-- 
Dr. John B. Haviland
Professor
Dept. of Anthropology, UCSD
9500 Gilman Dr.
La Jolla, CA 92093-0532
USA
office tel: +1 858 822-0752
lab: +1 858 534-6313
fax: +1 858 534-5946 email: jhaviland at ucsd.edu
web page: http://www.anthro.ucsd.edu/~jhaviland/