Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho.

Abstract

Are there universal as well as culturally particular experiences and expressions of time? In Semantics and Experience, Alverson questions the widely held anthropological assumption that temporal expression and experience represent little more than local cultural constructions. Drawing on extensive data from four widely divergent languages and cultures - English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho - he argues that people everywhere experience in fundamentally similar ways. Alverson begins by studying expressions in collocations - stock phrases, idioms, aphorism, or other formulaic expressions. He then examines the metaphors that often compose these collocations and discovers that five basic, universal categories of temporal expression and experience appear in all four languages - despite the independence of these languages from one another and despite the differing conditions of belief, knowledge and institutional structure among their respective cultures. While metaphorically constituted collocations do reflect culturally particular features of ideology, Alverson concludes, they clearly reflect universals of time as well. Semantics and Experience offers linguistic analysis of expressions in four radically different languages and cultures. It reveals not only how such expressions vary as a function of ideological and cultural differences but also how, despite these differences, they reveal a basic similarity that points to their origin in a pan-human approach to the construction and cognition of space.