Volume 19, Issue 2

Bantu languages are well-known for their complex tense systems encoding multiple degrees of remoteness. Two assumptions underlie most approaches to analysis of such systems: (1) that linguistic time is optimally construed as a unidimensional expanse, whereby multi-tense systems carve up the timeline in regular progressive intervals away from the speech event; and (2) that tense markers quintessentially exhibit no overlap in denoting reference along this expanse. In this paper, the authors propose a different approach to understanding Bantu tense systems which treats linguistic time—from the perspective of Ego (the conceptualizer)—as a multi-dimensional array comprising cognitively dissociated temporal worlds, or domains, temporally linked and grounded in the deictic dichotomy between events construed as occurring in a contemporal world of the “present” versus those situated in cognitively dissociated domains. That is, tense markers function to situate events in one of two distinct conceptual types of domain that correlate with different construals of time: Ego-moving or moving-time. Support comes from a variety of curious facts found in Bantu languages. A key element of this approach is that it provides an explanation for why temporal overlap of tenses does, indeed, occur, and advances the position that there are conceptually different pasts and futures.

An examination of conditionals in different languages leads to a distinction of three types of conditionals instead of the usual two (indicative and subjunctive). The three types can be explained by the degree of acceptance or as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent. The labels subjunctive and indicative are shown to be inadequate. So-called indicative conditionals comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact conditionals and the quite rare accepted-fact conditionals. Uncertain-fact conditionals may have a time shift in contemporary English and the future subjunctive in Portuguese (though not all of them do). Moreover, paraphrases of if with in case or supposing are usually possible with approximately the same meaning. Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features.

This paper explores metonymical and metaphorical expressions of verbal behaviour in Chinese. While metonymy features prominently in some of these expressions and metaphor in others, the entire dataset can be best viewed as spanning the metonymy-metaphor-continuum. That is, we observe a gradation of conceptual distance between the source and target which corresponds to the gradation of figurativity. Specifically, roughly half of the expressions we encounter are based on the ORGAN OF SPEECH ARTICULATION FOR SPEECH metonymy and can be considered as clustering around the metonymic pole. The other half can be seen as tending towards the metaphoric pole, as they are largely motivated by conceptual metaphors: (a) VERBAL BEHAVIOUR IS PHYSICAL ACTION, (b) SPEECH IS CONTAINER, (c) ARGUMENT IS WAR (or WORDS ARE WEAPONS) and (d) WORDS ARE FOOD. The interaction between metonymy and metaphor is an important cognitive strategy in the conceptualisation of verbal behaviour. The findings (i) evidence the gradient predictability of idiom meanings based on semantic compositionality, (ii) confirm the hypothesis of a bodily and experiential basis of cognition, (iii) suggest the existence of culture-specific models in the utilization of basic experiences, and (iv) point to the role of emotion in the metaphorisation of verbal behaviour as a socio-emotional domain.

Work by Russell Tomlin has shown that there is a close relationship between the syntactic subject of an utterance and the entity the speaker's attention is focused on while the utterance is being formulated, for descriptions of a simple event (Tomlin 1985, 1995, 1997). The experiment presented in this paper demonstrates that the same effect can be obtained for a more complex event, and that attention also impacts the spontaneous hand gestures produced along with speech. The paper shows that both syntactic subject and the information contained in gesture can be manipulated by changing which entity a speaker is focused on during utterance formulation. This pattern suggests that changes in conceptualization give rise to changes in both speech and gesture.