Aymara's time metaphor reversed?

[Andrew LaVelle]

It will be noticed on page 6 in Fig. 1a and b of the Nunez/Sweetser article
on Aymara that the two illustrated metaphoric models of time (universally
applicable to all cultures and languages, other than perhaps, in the
authors' opinions, Aymara) are not sufficient to account for a number of
temporal metaphors in English. Consider:

1. Time passed me by.
2. Time caught up with me.
3. I remained in the past.
4. I can't keep up with time.

In order for any of these expressions to make sense, both time and the
speaker must be conceptualized as moving forward together. If time is seen
as moving against me, or I against it, or both, then how could this
expression have any other rhetorical value than as a banal statement of
perceived fact? When such an expression is used, the implication is that
both viewer and object are moving in the same direction and that one
eventually passes the other due to the other's slowing down or stopping.

This is most especially captured in the metaphoric expression "time caught
up with me". If time and I are going in opposite directions, how could it
ever catch up with me?

As concerns the last two examples, similar to (1), I can't remain in the
past if time is flowing against me, for even if I stand motionless time
would continue to unfold, thereby causing me to come out of the past and
into the present. (This third example has additional meanings that include
the notions of voluntary desire to stay in the past or the nostalgia for the
past. My interpretation here emphasizes the purely temporal notion of being
fixed in past time independent of causation.) And the same is true for the
last example: I wouldn't have trouble keeping up with time if it was flowing
against me.    

But is this in contradiction to the underlying metaphor that Time is a
Spatial Linearization and that the past is behind me and the future in front
of me? I would argue that it is not. My claim would be that in addition to
this conceptual foundation represented metaphorically, there is the
metaphoric image that time and ego move forward together and in doing so
events come and go, receding deeper and deeper into the past, which is
metaphorically conceived as behind in spatial orientation.

With this richer metaphor, we live in time and are carried forward
temporally by time. It is the events that are moving toward us, just as
objects in a landscape approach me as I travel toward them. But temporal
progression moves in my same direction. The past is behind me, not because
time has traveled from front to back, but because the events that time
allowed me to experience have unfolded/changed and thus moved behind me as I
and time continue on our forward trajectory. (It is important to point out
here that time and tense (past, present, and future) are two very different
concepts in English.) And this more complex temporal metaphor is curiously
enough closer to the laws of physics as evidenced in Einstein's space-time
continuum, where time is relative to motion, being bound up with it, rather
than as a separate entity moving in opposition to it.

On a final note, speaking of languages that are particularly appropriate for
verbalizing logic, if pressed on the issue I would tend to agree with the
American logician and philosopher, Charles Peirce, that English is a prime
example of one. For an instantiation of this, we need not look any further
than our clear distinction linguistically between "time", "tense", and
"weather", whereas in many languages these first two terms are not
differentiated, and in some languages all three are the same (e.g., French:
"le temps" = time, tense, weather). But since logic -- happily -- does not
depend on language to be correctly understood and successfully employed, no
logician, regardless of his nationality, is hindered in any way by his
mother tongue. And as for a third logical operator between such binary
oppositions as true/false and no/yes, there is no need to look to Aymara
since Peirce proposed a triadic system in logic as long ago as the late
1800's, which in turn was followed up on and perfected by the Polish School
of logicians (i.e., Lukasiewicz, Bochenski, Tarski, et al).


Best,
Andrew


Andrew LaVelle
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
lavelle at unm.edu