Fwd: Help sought for 'Time and space in Aztec thought'

[john at research.haifa.ac.il]

Dear Funknetters,
My U. Haifa colleague Amos Megged sent me the message below looking for help
with a new project. Any of you have ideas?
Thanks,
John





----- Forwarded message from Amos Megged <amosmegged7 at gmail.com> -----
    Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:21:04 +0200
    From: Amos Megged <amosmegged7 at gmail.com>
Reply-To: Amos Megged <amosmegged7 at gmail.com>
 Subject: Help sought
      To: john at research.haifa.ac.il

Dear John,

I am now beginning a new project in my area entitled "Time and Space in
Aztec Thought". I am seeking your help concerning a person you might know
who could help me in the context of linguistics that I am using for this
project. I hereby append a short explanation of the linguistic uses in this
project. I will be much obliged for your help! Hag Sameah! Amos


"Hill’s notion of enactive language ideologies allow us to frame a study of
Aztec oral performance as embodying stereotypical but socially important
beliefs about the interaction between temporal and spatial domains in
historical narratives, prayers, and everyday discourse. According to
literary and linguistic theories, a deictic center is the notion describing
the encoded point of view of the speaker in a given narrative. Accordingly,
the reader of the narrative is assumed to create a mental model of  the
“story world”, and to imagine locating himself/herself within such a world.
The reader thus experiences and interprets the story from a deictic center,
which may shift, as the story develops. Time deixis is reference to time
relative to a temporal reference point. Typically, this point is the moment
of utterance. In this context, I will explore the ways by which the Nahuatl
narratives, both pictorial and alphabetic is created and structured, in
reference to a deictic center and a deictic time (Duchan et.als 1995; Green
1995). Rather than mapping out an explicit interaction between habitual
practices and deictic properties in quotidian speech acts, as Hanks (1990)
did in his landmark study of Yucatec Maya, I seek to focus on the collection
of data regarding the lexical and semantic expression of connections between
temporal and spatial domains in Nahuatl, particularly in colonial oral
genres that employ semantic and syntactic parallelism. I will also
concentrate on linguistic practices that yield any evidence regarding the
grammatical, lexical, and semantic conflation of temporal and spatial
references (e.g. location verbs, language ideologies about the meaning and
usage of body-part terminology in order to locate oneself in space, or the
anthropomorphization and zoomorphization of landscape features). I further
aim to contextualize such thinking within specific forms of social action in
this culture."


-- 
 Amos Megged (PhD Cambridge 1989)
Associate Professor in Mesoamerican Ethnohistory
Chairperson, The Helena Lewin Chair in Latin American Studies
Department of General History
University of Haifa
Israel
Tel 97248344876
My recent book: *Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial
Mesoamerica(Cambridge University Press, 2010)
*
http://frcaq.com/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521112277&ss=ind
*lecturer.haifa.ac.il/showen/164*

----- End forwarded message -----




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