Aymara's time metaphor reversed? Yahgan says....

[jess tauber]

Dan Everett wrote:

>Jess Tauber's remarks on Yaghan seem to recognize this as well, when 
he says "A question arises for me about whether such oppositions as in 'push  
forward' and 'push back' depend on a larger framework against which  
they are interpreted", but nothing in what follows that nice opening  
remark gives me an understanding of the ethnolinguistic  distributional 
arguments used to establish this apart from 'force dynamics'.<

My interest here is in how we conceptualize the physicomechanical and sociophysical realities we are forced to live with by being humans in the real world, with inherited and learned sensorimotor biases acting as mediators between us and that world, and how these then help shape language, and vice versa. This is the 'larger framework' I meant, and is thus a more universalist one. My comments about how we move through the world, versus how the world can move through us, are relevant here. 

If I say a date has been moved back, this relates to sensory information, that is, within the larger family of things that move through us, which will in many (most, all?) circumstances prototypically be coming FROM the front- all our major sense organs, and matter/energy input organs are in the front of our bodies, anticipating this. If a date is moved back, it is back in the direction from which it came, not OUR back.  Time will pass whether or not we move forward literally.

On the other hand, if I say pickup has been moved forward, this is action of our bodies, which is generally prototypically ahead, movement through the world versus the world through us. Moving the ACTION ahead means moving it in the same absolute direction as moving the TIME back on its own line.

If we look at the way our vertebrate bodies are constructed some sense can be made of this. Our musculature and nervous systems reflect this organization- adductor versus abductor muscles dividing the body up, sensory versus motor pathways, and so on. Inputs in the front, outputs in the back. In quadrupeds we have  information (which in lower animals deals more with space and time?) dorsally, and mass/energy ventrally. Modularization and modifications within modules sometimes mess up this nice neat scenario, but even then similar frames are evident within them.

Organizational structuring of this sort is present at every level- all the way down to the molecular. Perhaps just the most efficient way to put things together while still leaving room for functional inversions. Which is where my equation came in. Temporal inflectional terms can come from bodily motion/position verbs or sensorily related evidential terms- which have opposite perspectives perhaps, among other sources. In a tense system with mixed sources, we may have to flip our perspectives if we wish to maintain a link back, or when the motivating connection has been lost to awareness we can reinterpret and coopt forms to fit one dominant perspective.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net