7.1272, Sum: Spatio-temporal metaphors

[The Linguist List]

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-7-1272. Thu Sep 12 1996. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  264
 
Subject: 7.1272, Sum: Spatio-temporal metaphors
 
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---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Wed, 11 Sep 1996 15:30:34 PDT
From:  etc at merle.acns.nwu.edu (Lera Boroditsky)
Subject:  Spatio-temporal Metaphors Summary
 
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Wed, 11 Sep 1996 15:30:34 PDT
From:  etc at merle.acns.nwu.edu (Lera Boroditsky)
Subject:  Spatio-temporal Metaphors Summary
 
A little while ago I posted a query to the Linguist List about the way
spatial terms are used to talk about time.  Thank you to everyone who
responded:
 
Alan Dench/Robert Beard/Vincent DeCaen/Wendy C. Nelson/Charlie
Rowe/Dara Connolly/Marion_Kee/Mark Hansell/Ivan A Derzhanski/Markus
Hiller/Mark Sicoli/Balthasar Bickel/Gary Morgan
 
a quick paste-together summary follows:
 
My question was in three parts (responses follow each part):
 
1. Are there any languages in which spatial terms are not imported
into the domain of time?
 
>        While I am not sure if there are any languages which use
>orientations other than forward-behind, front-back, I'm certain that
>there are no languages which do not use spatial terms for temporal
>ones.  This is an interesting quirk of languages which to me
>demonstrates the arbitrariness of grammatical categories vis-a-vis
>semantic ones. No language, for example, confuses spatial and temporal
>lexical terms, i.e. I have found no language which consistently uses
>words like 'state' for 'year' and 'city' for 'month'. The concepts are
>clearly distinct in conceptual structure but never (as a class) in
>grammarical structure.
 
 
 
>According to BL Whorf (`The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior
>to Language', 1939), Hopi is such a language.  He reports that there
>is an absolute ban on the use of words expressing spatial relations in
>Hopi when no such relations actually exist; and that the laws of
>grammar are not suited for drawing an analogy between time and visible
>space.  Yet I understand that his analysis of Hopi spatial terms has
>been subjected to critical review in more recent years.
 
>It's been claimed that Hopi does not import spatial terms into the
>domain of time.  Whorf (1939) wrote "The absence of such metaphor from
>Hopi speech is striking.  Use of space terms when there is no space
>involved is not there. . ."
 
>A look into Hopi verb tense might also help with your third question
>about the order of events.  Modal clause linkage is reportedly used
>in Hopi to denote later and earlier events talked about in the same
>utterance.  Whorf talks about Hopi "verb categories," and "modes,"
>handling the work of English "tenses" but without the
.objectification, or materialization, of the temporal element.
 
 
2. Are there any languages that import spatial terms that use
primarily up/down, left/right, or in/out or any relations other than
front/back to talk about time.
 
>Mandarin Chinese uses up (or above) and down (or below) in some
>contexts to indicate what in English would be "last" and "next":
 
>English
>Mandarin
>
>last (week, month, time)                                shang4 ("up/above")
>
>next (week, month, time)                                xia4 (down/below")
>
>They are not used for days or years.  The only explanation I've heard
>offered for this is that it is based on the traditional top-to-bottom
>direction of written Chinese, and the perception that what's at the
>top of the page comes earlier than what's at the bottom (much as
>English speakers tend to draw time lines from left to right). I don't
>really buy that explanation, it seems to assume a strong influence of
>literacy on a very basic category of colloquial language.  Another
>possibility is that the metaphor is based on the idea of time as going
>downward-- time moves by itself with no motive force, and most
>phenomena in nature that seem to move on their own are moving from
>higher to lower position by force of gravity (flowing rivers, falling
>objects, etc).
 
 
 
>Well, `up/down' makes one think of Mandarin, where that opposition is
>somehow associated with the oppositions `past/future' and
>`before/after', cf. _shang4wu3_ `am', _xia4wu3_ `pm'; _shang4nian2_
>`last year' (lit.  `up year'); etc.  There's also Kala Lagaw Ya, a
>Pama-Nyungan language, on which Lesley Stirling
>(<lesley_stirling at MUWAYF.UNIMELB.EDU.AU>) is working; there seems to
>be an analogy there between `windward/leeward', `front/back',
>`up/down' and `before/after' and `backwards/forwards in time', the
>idea being that one is floating in a canoe with one's back in the
>direction of the motion, having, as it were, the past before one's
>eyes and the future still behind one's back.  But you should check the
>details with LS herself.
 
 
>names of seasons:
 
>english:  up/down:      spring          fall
 
>german dialects (*):
 
>...:      in/out:       auswaerts       einwaerts
                         out-ward        in-ward
                        ``spring''      ``fall''
 
>...:      (temporal):   fruehling       spaetling
                         early+DERIV     late+DERIV
                        ``spring''      ``fall''
 
>(*) the dialectal data is what i recall from some isogloss
>    map in
>        dtv atlas zur deutschen sprache.  ...: dtv.
>    unfortunately i do not remember what areas were marked for
>    the pattern i have quoted. standard german has ``fruehling''
>    for ``spring'', but ``herbst'' (cognate to ``harvest'' but
>    no longer analyzed) for ``fall'.
 
 
>In reply to Lera Boroditsky's recent query on spatio-temporal
>metaphors, I may draw attention to the languages of the Kiranti family
?of Sino-Tibetan. In at least one of these languages, Belhare (spoken
>in Eastern Nepal), temporal relations are primarily referred to by
>'up/down/across' terms -- rather than 'front/back' terms. For
>instance, 'after Monday' is 'Manglabar yolleng' 'on the further
>traverse side of Monday', where 'yo-' is the root for a further
>position on a horizontal line (such as the traverse direction on a
>hill) and '-leng' a directional case. Front/back terms only appear as
>recent borrowings from Nepali, the Indoeuropean lingua franca of
>Nepal.
 
>The Belhare system is discussed in:
 
>Bickel, Balthasar, 1994. 'Spatial operations in deixis,
>cognition, and culture: where to orient oneself in
>Belhare'. Working Paper No. 28, Cognitive Anthropology
>Research Group at the Max-Planck-Institute for
>Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
 
 
3. In what other ways do languages differ drastically in the way they
talk about the order of events in time?
 
 
>Afor what it's worth, in Biblical Hebrew you face or see the past while
>your back is to the future: that is, "behind" is in the future. I'm
>not sure why, though children come after their parents in succession;
>so while "behind", they're still the future generation.
 
>BTW, my work on tense-aspect strongly rejects a "future tense" in
>natural language; I wouldn't expect, therefore, much consistency in
>this area.  it might be interesting to know roughly how many languages
>are forward-looking and how many backward-looking.
 
>German--in the unmarked word order--lists events from general to
>specific:
 
>a) Wir fahren     heute um 3:00/
>   we  are-going  today at 3 o'clock.
 
>b) ??um 3:00 heute
 
>The (b) sentence is only grammatical if the general adverb is focused
>or an afterthought.
 
>I believe that in Quechua and Aymara those events and times which are
>in the past are referred to as being 'ahead of/in front of us', while
>future events are 'behind us'.  Why?  It has been rationalised for me
>as follows: That which has not yet happened is invisible, like what is
>behind us; that which has already transpired is known to us, and so is
>like what is ahead of us and within our field of vision.
 
>This would seem to imply that the analogy in European languages is
>that of a journey, e.g. a train journey along the time-line from past
>to future.  Therefore we think of the past as 'behind us' and the
>future as 'ahead of us'.
 
>Please consider this information to be anecdotal - I am not a
>professional linguist and I speak neither of the two languages
>mentioned above.
 
 
 
 
>The Sumerian terms _u[d]-kur_ (lit. `foreign day') `future day' and
>_u[d]-ria_ (lit. `runaway day') `past day', as well as the Akkadian
>_mahriu_ `front; past' and _warkiu_ `rear; future', are sometimes
>thought to show a world-view in which the past is what has already
>overtaken us and gone in the same direction where we're going also.
 
Musical notation:
 
>Much of the metaphoric conveyance was apparent in preposition choice
>but some of the utterances were more overt.  Here are some examples
>from my notes:
 
>Throw in a chord there. Throw in a chord here.
>It's just like dropping notes on the rhythm.
>The urge to solo over that song.
>I'd have more space for ideas to put in.
>But you can use that in the middle of some other thing.
>
>Music, like conversation, is an intangible entity which exists
>over a span of time.  The English speaker uses the material
>domain of space to approach this as a topic of discourse.  We
>also refer to a specific discourse as a space or place when we
>can ask ourself, or our partner, "Where was I? or Where were we?
>
 
>at a talk at UC Santa Cruz I was
>asked about going through something.  I made it through final's
>week.  You have to go through it to understand it.  This is one
>way that events in, or periods of time, can be talked about in
>English without resorting to metaphors that involve the front
>back relationship.  You might also look into Chinese languages.
>I remember hearing how Chinese time moves (a metaphor we also use
>in "time flies" but not as frequently as how we move through
>time).  Other related materials would be found in sociological
>and Anthropological scholarship pertaining to "the body" and the
>human experience of the body.  I'll try and find some sources to
>refer. Also note that in "linguist's speech" we talk about
>temporal events with left and right metaphors as we see our data
>as written on the page.
>
 
 
Once again, thanks to everyone who responded.
 
Lera Boroditsky
quimsy at nwu.edu
 
-
Michael Yopp
Northwestern University
m-yopp at nwu.edu
 
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