Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Time is elusive and abstract. We cannot perceive time directly through the senses in the way we perceive color, texture, or heat. In order to make sense of temporal experience, in order to grasp it, refer to it, and talk about it, we must construe it in a stable and tractable manner.  We, humans, do this via the recruitment of bodily-grounded mechanisms that make human imagination possible, such as conceptual metaphor and fictive motion. Thus, humans from all over the world, speaking different languages, naturally express (and think about) everyday temporal events as if they were *spatial* entities. This remarkable but ubiquitous phenomenon manifests itself via ordinary linguistic metaphorical expressions such as "the week ahead looks great" and "way back, in my childhood." But, beyond words and grammar, this phenomenon can be observed also through largely unconscious motor actions co-produced with speech — spontaneous gestures, which reveal its deep conceptual nature. In this presentation I will give an overview of how the question of human conceptualization of time can be studied empirically using a variety of research methods, from psycholinguistic experiments to neuroimaging, to ethnographic fieldwork. In the process, I'll show data from various experiments in the lab, and from my fieldwork among the Aymara of the Andes and the Yupno of the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea. Our results show that humans make sense of time sharing some basic spatial universals. But striking(!) differences also exist with respect to the types of spatial properties that are recruited for spatializing time, which raise issues about the nature and genesis of the neural processes that make them possible.

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