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Aymara, an Amerindian language spoken in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia,
southeastern Peru, and northern Chile, appears to present a fascinating contrast to these
well-known patterns, and a challenge to the cross-cultural universals of metaphoric cognition that have been slowly building up in our databases. In Aymara, the basic word for FRONT (nayra, "eye/front/sight") is also a basic expression meaning PAST, and the basic word for BACK (qhipa, "back/behind") is a basic expression for FUTURE meaning. We therefore need to ask how seriously we should take these simple lexical data as evidence about the cognitive construals of Aymara speakers. Further, is it in fact an instance of the same mappings we have seen in other languages, "reversed" in some way, or are there quite different metaphoric mappings involved? How would we know?
Several questions are at issue. Does Aymara really have a configuration of temporal metaphors unattested in other languages? Does it really lack the canonically expected metaphoric mappings of space onto time? If Aymara indeed has different metaphorical mappings, what are their entailments? Answering these questions will require an in-depth study of both the Aymara metaphors and the "expected" ones. In this article we intend to accomplish four things.
First, we shall provide a detailed analysis of the inferential organization of spatial metaphoric construals of time in general. We propose that to answer these questions we must consider a more accurate taxonomy of spatial metaphorical mappings of time than the one commonly found in the literature: one that focuses on reference points rather than on the identity of moving entities. Second, we analyze, from a purely linguistic point of view, a collection of Aymara common linguistic expressions involving temporal uses. We argue that it seems impossible to resolve some of these questions from linguistic data alone. Third, we defend the idea that to resolve such questions, it is possible to take advantage of an added data source in the gestures accompanying Aymara speakers' descriptions of time. In doing so, we show the crucial importance of working with complementary linguistic and gestural methodologies to access speakers'conceptual structures. Fourth, we want to analyze some issues regarding the embodied nature of human everyday abstraction (as it is manifested in spatial construals of time), its
universal constraints, and the possibilities for cultural variation. There is strong evidence (Boroditsky, 2000; Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Bowerman, 1996; Bowerman & Choi, 2001, 2003; Slobin, 1996, 2000, 2003) that language-specific patterns of usage prompt corresponding patterns of categorization and conceptualization that shape the habitual cognitive patterns of speakers in the relevant communities; Slobin has called this thinking for speaking. However, linguistic output only gives a certain amount of insight into what these cognitive patterns are. When a speaker says rock-solid evidence, should we see
active metaphoric cognitive construal of the evidence as a physically solid object, or might we rather conclude that this is a historically metaphoric but now purely literal fixed phrase? There are various ways to confirm the liveliness of a thinking for speaking pattern such as a conventional temporal metaphor: Examination of speakers' patterns of accompanying inferences (Boroditsky, 2000; Gibbs, 1994; Nъсez, 2006) and differences in attention and subsequent memory access (Slobin, 1996, 2000, 2003) are among them. Examination of real-time gestural production is another important one, and is particularly useful in cases where the data are ethnographic rather than experimental; gesture is always there, and visibly present in the videotaped data. читать далее[/url ] [url=http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2006/06/12/language-time.html]Andean language looks back to the future