2017 Gaby Sweetser time beyond language.pdf

Over the course of an average day, our experience of time is linked to spatial locations countless times. Every motion event – such as catching the train to work – involves a correspondence between a change in position and the passage of time (the train is at position α at time α, then position β at time β). The act of eating involves fine coordination of the timing of the mouth’s opening and closing with the position of the fork, and this is only scratching the surface. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the association between space and time is arguably a human universal, documented as preceding the development of language, both ontogenetically in human infants (Srinivasan and Carey 2010, de Hevia et al. 2014) and phylogenetically in other species of great ape (Merritt et al. 2010). This space-time linkage is reflected in linguistic metaphors the world over (though see also section 3.4), but also in non-linguistic artifacts, conventions and other manifestations of human culture and cognition (the subject of the present chapter).