Aymara's time metaphor reversed?

[Gilles Fauconnier]

Hi Andrew,

You're quite right, there are more mappings available in English (and 
other languages).  In the article below, we've looked at a wider range of 
data (including the case you point out).  We argue, among other things, 
that the SPACE-TIME mapping is not primitive, but emergent in more 
elaborate integration networks.

http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~faucon/RethinkingMetaphor19f06.pdf

(also accessible from http://blending.stanford.edu )

Gilles
______




On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Andrew LaVelle wrote:

> 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
>  
> 
> 

-- 
Gilles Fauconnier
Department of Cognitive Science
University of California San Diego
La Jolla CA 92093

E-mail    gfauconnier at ucsd.edu
http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~faucon/