Space and Time in Languages and Cultures

This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction.
The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes.
The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different albeit related point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic diversity (HCP 36) which focuses on the language-specific vis-à-vis universal aspects of linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference.

Frank Brisard, University of Antwerp:
This ambitious volume presents state-of-the-art work on how humans represent time and space in different languages, and discusses this work from an explicitly interdisciplinary and empirically driven perspective. [...] Important theoretical debates are touched upon, including questions of linguistic relativity (“thinking for speaking”) and whether localism is the right way to go about grounding one domain in the other. Exciting alternatives are proposed in this regard, suggesting an epistemic foundation for temporality that is primordial and wholly independent of those well-known TIME IS SPACE metaphors in language and thought. I highly recommend this volume to any scholar with a special interest in the universal status of temporal and spatial experiences and their varying realizations across cultures.