Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Meeting 15: Linguistic Relativism - Time

October 14, 2008

Mid-semester feedback

Metaphors for time

As far as we know, Time Passing is Relative Motion is a universal metaphor. Remember that in English, we find two versions of it: moving observer and moving time.

In some languages that also have Time Passing is Relative Motion, it works exactly the same:

French: On verra ça dans les jours qui viennent. On arrive à mon point du jour préféré

We'll see that in the coming days.    We're coming to my favorite time of day.

But in other languages, the metaphor is slightly different.

· Hupa of Northern California has time metaphors involving motion along a circular path

· Aymara (Chilean Andes), puts the past in front of the observer, and the future behind.

nayra eye, front, past nayra pacha front time = past

q’ipa back, behind, future   q’ipa pacha behind time = future

Mandarin Chinese has Time Passing is Relative Motion along two different axes.

· The future is ahead and the past is behind

· The past is up and the future is down:

Are time concepts relative?

The Linguistic Relativity question: does this linguistic difference result in Mandarin speakers thinking differently about time from English speakers?

· Participants answered two spatial prime questions (one FALSE, one TRUE) like the following (all subjects saw all English sentences and English instructions):

· They then answered a target question about time: either before/after statements (e.g., ‘‘March comes before April’’) or earlier/later statements (e.g., ‘‘March comes earlier than April’’).

· It was hypothesized that while English speakers would respond faster after a horizontal spatial prime, Mandarin speakers would not.

· In responding to the before/after questions all subjects were faster after horizontal primes. But with earlier/later questions, only English speakers were faster in this condition - Mandarin speakers were actually faster after a vertical prime.

This suggests that canonical use of a metaphor can influence speakers' representations of time.

Group work: What other metaphors are there for time? Find one of these that might differ across languages, and describe an experiment to test whether the linguistic difference results in a difference in non-linguistic thought.