Variation in the conceptualisation of time
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C3P92
2025-12-07
65
Variation in the conceptualisation of time
In this section we consider two languages that conceptualise time in very different ways from English: Aymara and Mandarin.
The past and future in Aymara
Aymara is an indigenous language of South America, spoken in the Andean region of Peru, Chile and Bolivia. There is good linguistic and gestural evidence that while Aymara features variants of both ego-based and time-based cognitive models for time, in the ego-based model, Aymara speakers conceptualise the FUTURE as being located behind the ego, while PAST is conceptualised as being in front of the ego (Núñez and Sweetser, forthcoming). This pattern of elaboration contrasts with the English pattern. Consider example (60).
This example shows that the lexical concept PAST is elaborated in terms of a location behind the ego. This pattern is extended to all past-oriented lexical concepts:
The expression for the ‘past’ is literally ‘front time’, while the expression for ‘future’ is ‘behind time’. This suggests that Aymara has the opposite pattern of elaboration from English. A gestural study of Aymara speakers in which Núñez participated (discussed in Núñez and Sweetser, forthcoming) provides sup porting evidence that the past is conceptualised as ‘in front’ and the future ‘behind’. This study reveals that, when speaking about the past, Aymara speakers gesture in front, and when speaking about the future, they gesture behind. A further interesting difference between Aymara and a language like English is that the Aymaran ego-based model for time appears to be ‘static’. In other words, there appears to be no evidence that temporal ‘events’ are conceptualised as moving relative to the ego, nor that the ego moves relative to tempo ral ‘events’. This means that Aymara lacks the ‘path-like’ ego-based moving time and moving ego cognitive models, but has instead a ‘static’ ego-based model for time. Aymara speakers also make use of the temporal sequence model. In doing so, however, their gestures relate to temporal events along the left–right axis, rather than the front–back axis.
The pattern of elaboration for PAST and FUTURE in Aymara appears to be motivated by another aspect of the Aymaran language. Aymara is a language that, unlike English, grammatically encodes evidentiality: speakers are obliged by the language to grammatically mark the nature of the evidence they rely on in making a particular statement: whether the speaker has witnessed the event described with their own eyes, or whether the event is known to them through hearsay (Mircale and Yapita Moya 1981). It appears likely that the value assigned to visual evidence has consequences for the elaboration of concepts such as PAST and FUTURE. Events that have been experienced are conceptualised as having been seen. Things that are seen are located in front of the ego, due to human physiology. It follows that PAST is conceptualised as being in front of the ego. In contrast, events that have yet to be experienced are conceptualised as being behind the ego, a location that is inaccessible to the human visual apparatus (Mircale and Yapita Moya 1981; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Evans 2004a; Núñez and Sweetser, forthcoming).
Earlier and later in Mandarin
We now briefly consider how the temporal concepts EARLIER and LATER are conceptualised in Mandarin. Again we find a contrast with the English pattern that we discussed earlier, where concepts relating to the distinction between EARLIER and LATER are elaborated in terms of their relative location on the horizontal axis. The following examples illustrate this pattern, where EARLIER is ‘before’ and LATER is ‘after’. Recall Figure 3.18, which shows how LATER follows EARLIER in this model of TIME.
In Mandarin there is a pattern in which the vertical axis elaborates the dis tinction between EARLIER and LATER. Concepts that are earlier (experienced first) are conceptualised as ‘higher’ or ‘upper’, while concepts that are later (experienced subsequent to the first) are conceptualised as ‘lower’. Examples (67)–(71) from Yu (1998) illustrate this pattern.
According to Shinohara (2000) the motivation for this pattern of elaboration may be due to how we experience slopes. When an object is rolled down a slope, the earlier part of the event is at the top of the slope, while due to the force of gravity the later part of the event is lower down. This idea is represented in Figure 3.22.
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