- Southwest University, School of foreign languages, Department MemberUniversity of Lisbon, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Department Memberadd
- Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Cognitive Anthropology, Material Culture, Cognitive Linguistics, Human Evolution, and 21 moreSocial Cognition, Language Acquisition, Human Development, History Of Psychology, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Cognitive development, Intersubjectivity, Cognitive Semantics, Cultural Relativism, Symbols, Linguistic Relativity, Connectionist Modeling, Cognitive Semiotics, Conceptual Blending, Spatial semantics, The Semantics of Spatial Prepositions, Anthropology of Time, Embodied Cognition, Space and Time (Philosophy), Niche Construction Theory, and Language Evolutionedit
- Chris Sinha is Honorary Professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the Un... moreChris Sinha is Honorary Professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia; Visiting Professor at Southwest University, Chongqing; Associate Researcher at the University of Lisbon, Department of History and Philosophy of Science; and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. He gained his BA in Developmental Psychology at the University of Sussex and his doctorate (cum laude) at the University of Utrecht. Chris has taught in departments of Education, Psychology, and Language and Communication, in Brazil, China, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, India, and Sweden, including three positions at Faculty full professor rank. He held the position of Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, 2002-2005. He is an experienced lecturer at international conferences (including 40 keynote and plenary lectures at international conferences), and has taught at many graduate and research schools. He is Past President of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association and of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association; Founding General Editor (2009-2016) of the journal Language and Cognition; and a current member of four international journal editorial boards and four book series editorial boards. He was organizer in 2004 of the First International Conference on Language Culture and Mind, and then again the 7th edition in 2016, and continues as a member of the scientific committee of this biannual conference.
Chris Sinha's central research interest is in the relations between language, cognition and culture, and a main aim of his research is to integrate cognitive with socio-cultural approaches to language, communication and human development. He is experienced in field experimental and observational methods. He has authored 3 monographs and 130+ articles, and edited 4 volumes, in disciplines including anthropology, linguistics, education, evolutionary biology, connection science, as well as developmental and cultural psychology.edit
The turn of the century witnessed key developments in biological sciences with profound implications both for biological theory and for the sciences of language. The decoding of the human genome showed that humans share with their closest... more
The turn of the century witnessed key developments in biological sciences with profound implications both for biological theory and for the sciences of language. The decoding of the human genome showed that humans share with their closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, between 95% and 98% of their genes, depending on the methodology for establishing similarity. This finding threw doubt on the plausibility of the claim that the human language capacity is a consequence of a species-unique, genetically determined neurobiological innovation. Around the same time, it was shown that cultural variation is not unique to the human species; this was initially demonstrated with reference to chimpanzees, but it has since been shown that cultural variation and cultural transmission occurs in a variety of mammalian and avian species. In theoretical biology, the ‘Central Dogma’ of Neo-Darwinism was challenged by the (re-)emergence of ‘Evo-Devo’ and niche construction approaches to evolutionary processes. These developments have led to an increasing acceptance of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis that goes beyond, and in some crucial respects contradicts, the Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis of the mid-twentieth century. This recasting of evolutionary theory cannot fail to impact the foundations of biolinguistics. Over a roughly contemporaneous period, in the language sciences, the autonomy both of language as a “faculty”, and of grammar from meaning, has been challenged by cognitive linguistics and its more recent companion, cultural linguistics. Together, these developments of recent decades compel the recognition that biology and culture cannot be seen, as they largely were in the last century, as competing ‘causes’ of language and human cognition. A 21st century biolinguistics needs to accommodate the new findings in biology, language sciences (and related disciplines such as archaeology) through the elaboration of a biocultural linguistics that is fundamentally interdisciplinary and is situated in contemporary accounts of both human evolution and linguistic diversity. This chapter will outline the main features of a biocultural science of language, and address the complex and dynamical relationship between what all human languages have in common, in what ways they display variation, and how language variation is (and is not) situated in differences between cultures and societies.
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Our aim in this chapter is to critically examine the sciences of language as practices/theories in a complex of inter-related social, cultural, political and ideological ecologies. The specific topic around which we try to disentangle and... more
Our aim in this chapter is to critically examine the sciences of language as practices/theories in a complex of inter-related social, cultural, political and ideological ecologies. The specific topic around which we try to disentangle and illuminate this web of practice/theory is the study of endangered (especially, Indigenous minority) languages and cultures. The motivation for this exploration is our conviction that understanding languages as ecological phenomena necessitates a reflexive, deconstructive examination of the presuppositions underlying conventional answers to two key questions: “what is [a] language?” and “how do languages articulate their ecological grounding?”. The plural notion of “situated language sciences” implicates, simultaneously, the ecology of scientific practices/theories, and the ecology of social and cultural practices embedding languaging. In respect of both these perspectives, our interrogation is ontological: we want to understand what language sciences are about—that is, what do language sciences set up and analyse as their objects, and in what kinds of worlds are practices of languaging ecologically enmeshed?
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This chapter begins by analyzing metaphoric and spatialized conceptualizations of time in theories of human social evolution, from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century onwards. The situatedness in European imperial conquest of... more
This chapter begins by analyzing metaphoric and spatialized conceptualizations of time in theories of human social evolution, from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century onwards. The situatedness in European imperial conquest of the concept of social progress, as well as the denial of coevalness to non-Western peoples, is emphasized. The projection of this conceptual "phylocultural complex" onto early human evolution is described, as well as the reaction against it from the early twentieth century onwards. The roots of deterministic narratives of "agriculture as destiny" in nineteenth century anthropology are explored, and the contemporary counter-narrative of the "return of coevalness" is described in relation to co-evolutionary theories of hominin evolution, the social systems of historic human societies, and the impact of colonization on indigenous non-Western societies. The chapter concludes by summarizing the evidence for a "globalization of time" in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, set in train by the European conquest of the Americas, and ushering in the Anthropocene epoch.
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The topic addressed in this paper is the nature of persuasive discourse in the political domain. The paper seeks to place social theory in relation to linguistic pragmatics through the examination of how a social category - ideology -... more
The topic addressed in this paper is the nature of persuasive discourse in the political domain. The paper seeks to place social theory in relation to linguistic pragmatics through the examination of how a social category - ideology - achieves its realization and effect in particular forms of discourse, with the aid of theories both of ideology and of communicative action.
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Openings in the past and present between semiotics and theories of human development and evolution are explored. The foundations in theories of the sign of the psychological theories of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Karl Bühler are... more
Openings in the past and present between semiotics and theories of human development and evolution are explored. The foundations in theories of the sign of the psychological theories of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Karl Bühler are summarized. Limitations as well as innovations of these 20th century approaches are identified. Key characteristics of the new wave of semiotically informed theories of human development and evolution are outlined, including the semiotics of artefacts and niche construction.
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This article addresses two previously unresolved puzzles regarding the relationship between temporal and spatial conceptualizations in Mandarin Chinese. First, apparently conflicting data have led to disagreement over whether temporal... more
This article addresses two previously unresolved puzzles regarding the relationship between temporal and spatial conceptualizations in Mandarin Chinese. First, apparently conflicting data have led to disagreement over whether temporal usages of the terms qian and hou, whose spatial meanings of ‘front’ and ‘back’ are often considered to be primary, are based on a canonical facing of Ego towards past or towards future. We argue that this issue can be resolved by positing invariant Sequential (S-)Time meanings of, respectively, EARLIER and LATER for these terms, with variable USES to refer to past and future events and perspectives in Deictic (D-)Time being secondary and contextually governed. Second, the question of which of the sagittal, vertical and lateral orientational axes are more fundamental in spatio-temporal language and cognition for Mandarin Chinese speakers has been much debated. We review these issues, propose solutions based on linguistic analysis and report five experiments to test the analysis. Our findings are consistent with our analysis of the primacy in Mandarin Chinese of the invariant S-time construal of the terms qian ‘front’ (=EARLIER) and hou ‘back’ (=LATER) over their contextually governed D-time interpretations as referring to pastness and futurity. We find also that the preferred lexicalization of temporal relations between events by Mandarin speakers involves the sagittal axis terms qian and hou, but this does not mean that this linguistic conceptualization is also imposed by speakers as a preference for the sagittal axis for non-linguistic representations of event sequences. Finally, our data indicate that the temporal meanings of qian and hou (EARLIER and LATER) are more salient for speakers than their spatial meanings (front and back) in motion event conceptualizations.
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Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in the biological and socio-cultural sciences that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Language itself can be... more
Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in the biological and socio-cultural sciences that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Language itself can be considered as a biocultural niche and evolutionary artifact. An analysis of the cognitive and semiotic status of artifacts, based upon a distinction between the fundamental semiotic relations of “counting as” and “standing for,” reveals that language as a social and semiotic system is not only grounded in embodied engagements with the material and social-interactional world, but also grounds a sub-class of artifacts of particular significance in the cultural history of human cognition. Symbolic cognitive artifacts inherit their representational function from language. They materially and semiotically mediate human cognition, and are not merely informational repositories, but co-agentively constitutive of culturally and historically emergent cognitive domains. Examples of this constitutive role of symbolic cognitive artifacts are drawn from the author’s research with his colleagues on cultural and linguistic conceptualizations of time, and their cultural variability. The implications of conceptualizing cognition as the co-agentive intermeshing of intersubjective and interobjective processes, lead to a distinction between the notion of “extended embodiment” as labeled here and other “extended mind” approaches.
Research Interests: Evolution of Language, Semiosphere, Niche Construction, Material Culture & Materiality, Artifacts, and 6 moreHuman biocultural evolution, Technosphere and Human Ecology, How Is Human Communication a Product of Biocultural Evolution, Artifactual Relativity, Symbolic Cognitive Artifacts, and Human Symbolic Evolution
In this article, we compare and contrast the versions of national populism propagated by Boris Johnson and the UK Conservative Party, and Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Britain is a liberal democracy, while China is an... more
In this article, we compare and contrast the versions of national populism propagated by Boris Johnson and the UK Conservative Party, and Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Britain is a liberal democracy, while China is an increasingly authoritarian one-party state. Britain is a declining power, while China is a rising one. Despite these differences, however, the projection on the world stage of both countries has a key narrative thread in common: the re-imagination of Empire and its history. We situate this analysis in the controversies surrounding the current movement for de-colonialising history.
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This chapter reviews the history, main theoretical issues, methods and selected key research topics in the study of language, culture and cognition. The chapter emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the field, summarizing the... more
This chapter reviews the history, main theoretical issues, methods and selected key research topics in the study of language, culture and cognition. The chapter emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of the field, summarizing the contributions of anthropology and psychology as well as linguistics. It traces the development of cultural linguistics from anthropological and cognitive linguistic traditions. The history and present status of the theory of linguistic relativity, as well as current approaches drawing upon extended embodiment, are discussed. The key research topics of colour, space and time, and self and identity are addressed, and the state of the art is summarized in each of them.
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In this paper we address ontological metaphorical linguistic expressions in a Brazilian Tupian language and culture, based on conceptual metaphor theory. We focus on metaphors of personification and body part constructions in the Amondawa... more
In this paper we address ontological metaphorical linguistic expressions in a Brazilian Tupian language and culture, based on conceptual metaphor theory. We focus on metaphors of personification and body part constructions in the Amondawa language; analyzing examples from retellings of mythical narrative texts and from complex sentences and compound words. We explore the relations for the speakers of this indigenous language between their experience of physical and mythical domains and their linguistic conceptualizations, as a window to understanding the relations between language, thought, identity and culture. We offer a speculative interpretation of the pervasiveness of personification in this language in terms of an ontology claimed to be common in Amazonian cultures, that in anthropology goes by the name of perspectivism.
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This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication in ontogenesis, in phylogenesis and in biocultural niche evolution (ecogenesis), within an EvoDevoSocio framework. I begin by discussing the nature of... more
This article focuses on the interweaving of constructive praxis with communication in ontogenesis, in phylogenesis and in biocultural niche evolution (ecogenesis), within an EvoDevoSocio framework. I begin by discussing the nature of symbolization, its evolution from communicative signaling and its elaboration into semantic systems. I distinguish between the symbol-ready and the language-ready brain, leading to a discussion of linguistic conceptualization and its dual grounding in organism and language system. There follows an outline account of the interpenetration in the human biocultural niche-complex of semiosphere and technosphere, mediated by the evolution of the niche of infancy. Symbolization (the foundation of the semiosphere) is by definition normative; the normative character of the technosphere is demonstrated by the interrelations in human development between affordance, action schema and canonical functional object schema. A model of the neuro-computational implementation of dual grounding is proposed.
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We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and... more
We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on thelast common ancestor of humans and monkeys (LCA-m) and chimpanzees(LCA-c) and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m to LCA-c to protohumans
to H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis
of the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language.
to H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis
of the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language.
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Psychology as a discipline is preoccupied, obsessed you could say, with the repeatable; it seeks regularities and predictabilities, and it does so, normatively, using an experimental method grounded in the notion of replicability. John's... more
Psychology as a discipline is preoccupied, obsessed you could say, with the repeatable; it seeks regularities and predictabilities, and it does so, normatively, using an experimental method grounded in the notion of replicability. John's approach is the diametric opposite of this. Citing Goethe, Vygotsky and Wittgenstein, he advocated " a method which begins with first-time, unrepeatable events which matter to us, which make a difference to our lives, events which open up new ways of seeing and thinking to us, to do with the distinctive ways of being in the world of this, that or some other form of life " (Shotter, 2000: 248). The unrepeatability of events is especially manifest in language, in what Mikhail Bakhtin called the " interpretative understanding of non-reiterative utterance … not tied to the (reiterative) elements of the system of language … but to other (non-reiterative) texts by particular relations of a dialogical nature " (cited in Todorov, 1984: 50-51). John counterposes to the imperatives of monological reasoning (generalization, replication, reproduction, system and structure) the qualities of dialogically shared experience: Unrepeatability, one-offness, situatedness and poïesis—the making of meaning from what is found, or to hand.
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Cognitive Linguistics is currently undergoing two shifts in orientation. One of these has been called " the quantitative turn " (Janda, in press); it is based upon the increasing use by cognitive linguists of quantitative methods, both... more
Cognitive Linguistics is currently undergoing two shifts in orientation. One of these has been called " the quantitative turn " (Janda, in press); it is based upon the increasing use by cognitive linguists of quantitative methods, both experimental and corpus-based (Janda, 2017). The other has been called " the social turn " (Harder, 2010) and is based upon the increasing attention by cognitive linguists to socio-communicative contexts and processes (Hollman, 2017) and to the intersubjective foundations of language and of the developmental and evolutionary dynamics of language (Zlatev et al. 2009; Sinha 2015; Pascual and Oakley, 2017). Sinha (2017) argues that these two " turns " are in tension, perhaps to an extent in contradiction with each other, because of the neglect by proponents of the quantitative turn of the importance of qualitative concepts and methods. The tension between quantitative and qualitative approaches in the sciences of mind is not, of course, new; it can be dated back to the emergence of psychology as a science in the 19 th century. In its classical formulation, it turns on the distinction in the theory of method between Erklarung (explanation) – the method of the natural sciences; and Verstehen (understanding)—the method of the human sciences. This distinction was recast by the distinguished and influential American psychologist Jerry Bruner in terms of a contrast between between paradigmatic sciences (concerned with form, structure and rule) and narrative sciences (concerned with meaning and context) (Bruner 1990). Bruner was responsible, in the 1960s, for introducing to an American, and wider Western, audience the work and ideas of the great Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky. One of Vygotsky's closest, and indeed equally distinguished, collaborators was the psychologist and neuroscientist A.R. Luria. In his autobiographical book " The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology " , Luria discusses how it might be possible to resolve this tension between the quantitative and qualitative approaches, which he characterizes, respectively, as Classical and Romantic Science: " Classical scholars are those who look upon events in terms of their constituent parts. Step by step they single out important units and elements until they can formulate abstract, general laws … One outcome of this approach is the reduction of living reality with all its richness of detail to abstract schemas … Romantics in science want neither to split living reality into its elementary components nor to represent the wealth of life's concrete events in abstract models that lose the properties of the phenomena themselves. " (Luria, 1979: 174). My interdisciplinary research over many years has been deeply influenced by the ideas of Vygotsky and Luria (e.g. Sinha 1988, 1989). In particular, I have shared their insistence on the centrality of culture and society to the analysis of mind and language, and their recognition of the importance of pluralism of method, while not losing sight of the importance of the scientific stance. It is, for me, especially apt that I have the honour to be invited to this conference during the centenary year of the Russian Revolution; a historical event that was of incalculable significance to the development of the lives and work of Vygotsky and Luria. In this lecture, I will review some of my own research in
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representaSon made that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for any acSons, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or... more
representaSon made that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for any acSons, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connecSon with or arising out of the use of this material. Brief Encounters is an open access journal that supports the disseminaSon of knowledge to a global readership. All arScles are free to read and accessible to all with no registraSon required. For more informaSon please visit our journal homepage: h9p://briefencounters-journal.co.uk/BE.
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In this chapter, we attempt to unmask the ideological bias inherent in influential conceptions of the methods, motivations and practices of endangered language documentation research (ELDR) by addressing the unequal exchange that... more
In this chapter, we attempt to unmask the ideological bias inherent in influential conceptions of the methods, motivations and practices of endangered language documentation research (ELDR) by addressing the unequal exchange that frequently characterizes the relationship between the linguistic researcher, on the one hand, and the language community and, in some cases, local researchers, on the other. We highlight the extent to which common answers to the question “Why document endangered languages?” suppress the sociocultural and historical relations within which ELDR practices are situated. We review the historical evolution of the conceptualization of language documentation research, and its relationship to language preservation and revitalization. We ask what it is that makes ELDR scientific, critically analysing the models of “language” and of “science” that are frequently deployed in arguments for its importance, and questioning the value-neutrality of the notion “scientific community” in this context. We suggest that the conjunction of dominant concepts of “language” and “data”, and the relations between “international” and “local” ELD researchers, generates an ideological construction of unequal competence that operates to justify unequal North-South exchange relations. We document this claim of unequal and at times abusive North-South exchange with brief, anonymized case studies. We conclude by noting that, in comparison with other social science disciplines, linguistics seems resistant to reflexive and self-critical analysis of its ideological dimension; and suggesting possible ways of raising awareness and generalizing models of good practice.
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It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this... more
It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and struc-tured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at the constructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.
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Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in evolutionary biology that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. It is regarded by many evolutionary biologists as... more
Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in evolutionary biology that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. It is regarded by many evolutionary biologists as providing a significant revision of the Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis that unified Darwin’s theory of natural and sexual selection with 20th century population genetics. Niche construction theory has been invoked as a processual mediator of social cognitive evolution and of the emergence and evolution of language. I argue that language itself can be considered as a biocultural niche and evolutionary artifact. I provide both a general analysis of the cognitive and semiotic status of artifacts, and a formal analysis of language as a social and semiotic institution, based upon a distinction between the fundamental semiotic relations of “counting as” and “standing for”. I explore the consequences for theories of language and language learning of viewing language as a biocultural niche. I suggest that not only do niches mediate organism-organism interactions, but also that organisms mediate niche-niche interactions in ways that affect evolutionary processes, with the evolution of human infancy and childhood as a key example. I argue that language as a social and semiotic system is not only grounded in embodied engagements with the material and social-interactional world, but also grounds a sub-class of artifacts of particular significance in the cultural history of human cognition. Symbolic cognitive artifacts materially and semiotically mediate human cognition, and are not merely informational repositories, but co-agentively constitutive of culturally and historically emergent cognitive domains. I provide examples of the constitutive cognitive role of symbolic cognitive artifacts drawn from my research with my colleagues on cultural and linguistic conceptualizations of time, and their cultural variability. I conclude by reflecting on the philosophical and social implications of understanding artifacts co-agentively.
Keywords: biocultural niche construction, language, symbolic cognitive artifact, time concepts, human life course, social institutions.
Keywords: biocultural niche construction, language, symbolic cognitive artifact, time concepts, human life course, social institutions.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Philosophy Of Language, Social-Ecological Systems, Ontology of Artefacts, Niche Construction Theory, and 4 moreLanguage evolution and development, Language as a complex, dynamic system; the relations of language proper with gesture and motion; language change and evolution., Infant Development, and Human life course
In this article I address the significance of semiotic processes supporting early social interaction, communication and learning in the evolution of the modern human niche of infancy and childhood, known to be extended even in comparison... more
In this article I address the significance of semiotic processes supporting early social interaction, communication and learning in the evolution of the modern human niche of infancy and childhood, known to be extended even in comparison with closely related hominin species. Human infancy and childhood is a biocultural niche, embedded within and causally contributing to the expansion and elaboration of the wider human biocultural complex, including both semiotic and praxic spheres. Epigenetic constructive processes were crucial in the evolution of the niche of ontogenesis, and niche construction through epigenetic augmentation is the key to understanding human symbolic evolution, the advent of human behavioral modernity and the capture of evolutionary processes by socio-cultural dynamics.
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We propose an event-based account of the cognitive and linguistic representation of time and temporal relations. Human beings differ from non-human animals in entertaining and communicating elaborate detached (as opposed to cued) event... more
We propose an event-based account of the cognitive and linguistic representation of time and temporal relations. Human beings differ from non-human animals in entertaining and communicating elaborate detached (as opposed to cued) event representations and temporal relational schemas. We distinguish deictically based (D-time) from sequentially based (S-time) representations, identifying these with the philosophical categories of A-series and B-series time. On the basis of crosslinguistic data, we claim that all cultures employ both D-time and S-time representations. We outline a cognitive model of event structure, emphasizing that this does not entail an explicit, separate representation of a time dimension. We propose that the notion of an event-independent, metric “time as such” is not universal, but a cultural and historical construction based on cognitive technologies for measuring time intervals. We critically examine claims that time is universally conceptualized in terms of spatial metaphors, and hypothesize that systematic space-time metaphor is only found in languages and cultures that have constructed the notion of time as a separate dimension. We emphasize the importance of distinguishing what is universal from what is variable in cultural and linguistic representations of time, and speculate on the general implications of an event-based understanding of time.
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This article sheds light on the history of the sciences of mind within which the development of cognitive linguistics can be situated. It shows that it is the modern inheritor of an older tradition, antedating the behaviorist ascendancy... more
This article sheds light on the history of the sciences of mind within which the development of cognitive linguistics can be situated. It shows that it is the modern inheritor of an older tradition, antedating the behaviorist ascendancy in mid-twentieth century psychology which preceded classical cognitive science. This tradition, centered in psychology but drawing heavily on biology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, was a kind of cognitive science avant la lettre. It is a measure of the poverty of behaviorism that psychology was compelled to concede disciplinary leadership in classical cognitive science to formalist linguistics and computer science. This article also considers conceptual foundations in psychology, including rule versus schema, the role of imagery in language comprehension and in cognition, consciousness and metacognition, self and autobiographic memory, meaning, embodiment, linguistic schemas and metaphor, and representation and symbolization.
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Há uma continuidade desenvolvimental entre estruturas e estratégias comportamentais e estruturas e estratégias linguísticas, de tal forma que as segundas suplantam as primeiras, mas, pelo menos inicialmente, ambas desempenham as mesmas... more
Há uma continuidade desenvolvimental entre estruturas e estratégias comportamentais e estruturas e estratégias linguísticas, de tal forma que as segundas suplantam as primeiras, mas, pelo menos inicialmente, ambas desempenham as mesmas (ou similares) funções cognitivas/comunicativas. Esta combinação de similaridade estrutural
e continuidade funcional é suficiente para explicar a aquisição e desenvolvimento da linguagem. Esta definição é suficientemente larga para incluir tanto o funcionalismo ((cognitivo)) como a mais restrita variedade de funcionalismo inserida na teoria de fala-acto e na
pragmática. A hipótese cognitiva tal como a hipótese da pragmática tem em comum o facto de negarem a necessidade de postular um dispositivo nativo de aquisição da linguagem.
e continuidade funcional é suficiente para explicar a aquisição e desenvolvimento da linguagem. Esta definição é suficientemente larga para incluir tanto o funcionalismo ((cognitivo)) como a mais restrita variedade de funcionalismo inserida na teoria de fala-acto e na
pragmática. A hipótese cognitiva tal como a hipótese da pragmática tem em comum o facto de negarem a necessidade de postular um dispositivo nativo de aquisição da linguagem.
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Pressure on journal space from the large number of submitted papers has always limited severely the number of book reviews which could be included in any issue. This pressure has become so much heavier in recent years that even to... more
Pressure on journal space from the large number of submitted papers has always limited severely the number of book reviews which could be included in any issue. This pressure has become so much heavier in recent years that even to maintain the present number of reviews would exclude many interesting and valuable research reports. That number is already so small that the selection of books for criticism is inevitably a somewhat invidious process. Starting in May 1980, each issue of the journal will include one or two review articles in place of the present collection of separate reviews. In these articles recent books in a particular area of research will be considered together, the area being announced in the preceding issue.
Research Interests: Psychology and Education
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Neste trabalho, contestamos a Hipótese do Mapeamento Universal com baseem pesquisa realizada com uma língua Tupi-Kawahib, da Amazônia brasileira: a língua amondawa. Salientamos, entretanto, que não contestamos a hipotética universalidade... more
Neste trabalho, contestamos a Hipótese do Mapeamento Universal com baseem pesquisa realizada com uma língua Tupi-Kawahib, da Amazônia brasileira: a língua amondawa. Salientamos, entretanto, que não contestamos a hipotética universalidade dos fundamentos cognitivos do mapeamento linguístico espaçotempo.
Cada língua possui recursos lexicais e gramaticais para especificar as relações entre eventos, objetos e falantes no espaço e no tempo. A linguagem do espaço e a linguagem do tempo estão intimamente relacionadas na maioria das línguas,... more
Cada língua possui recursos lexicais e gramaticais para especificar as relações entre eventos, objetos e falantes no espaço e no tempo. A linguagem do espaço e a linguagem do tempo estão intimamente relacionadas na maioria das línguas, senão em todas as línguas, e tem sido proposto que a linguagem do tempo é universalmente derivada da língua do espaço por meio de mapeamentos metafóricos. Contrariamos esta hipótese, com base em uma avaliação do espaço e do tempo nas línguas do mundo, embora reconhecendo que, provavelmente, as motivações cognitivas são universais para tais mapeamentos onde eles ocorrem. Enfatizamos a variabilidade linguística e cultural das relações linguísticas do espaço-tempo, e observamos que os conceitos culturais e linguísticos de tempo podem ser derivados de outros domínios conceituais além do domínio do espaço. Ressaltamos também que a motivação da estrutura linguística pela cognição (incluída pela metáfora conceitual) é sempre mediada por padrões e processos c...
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Page 371. chapter 15 Language and the signifying object From convention to imagination Chris Sinha and Cintia Rodríguez In this chapter we argue that intersubjectivity cannot be grounded in individual mental or representational content. ...
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... Castoriadis finds common ground here with cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff ... cognition and its iconology are given shape and substance as an object of philosophy and science. ... respect to their implicit or explicit... more
... Castoriadis finds common ground here with cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff ... cognition and its iconology are given shape and substance as an object of philosophy and science. ... respect to their implicit or explicit iconologies (their stance in iconological matters). ...
ABSTRACT Who would have thought that clocks could be so controversial
... The chapters by Pika, Zlatev and Verhagen focus on both continuities and discontinuities ... Finally, while most authors adopt a definition of intersubjectivity such as the sharing and understanding of experiential content, Sinha and... more
... The chapters by Pika, Zlatev and Verhagen focus on both continuities and discontinuities ... Finally, while most authors adopt a definition of intersubjectivity such as the sharing and understanding of experiential content, Sinha and Rodríguez con-clude the volume by stressing ...
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ABSTRACT
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... Page 10. To appear in: Filipović, Luna and Kasia M. Jaszczolt (eds.) Space and Time across Languages and Cultures Volume II: Language, Culture and Cognition. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. 10 ... four‟ are derived. The non-derived terms... more
... Page 10. To appear in: Filipović, Luna and Kasia M. Jaszczolt (eds.) Space and Time across Languages and Cultures Volume II: Language, Culture and Cognition. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. 10 ... four‟ are derived. The non-derived terms are pe'i one‟ and monkõi two‟. ...
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ABSTRACT There exists broad agreement that participatory, intersubjective engagements in infancy and early childhood, particularly triadic engagements, pave the way for the folk psychological capacities that emerge in middle childhood.... more
ABSTRACT There exists broad agreement that participatory, intersubjective engagements in infancy and early childhood, particularly triadic engagements, pave the way for the folk psychological capacities that emerge in middle childhood. There is little agreement, however, about the extent to which early participatory engagements are cognitively prerequisite to the later capacities; and there remain serious questions about exactly how narrative and other language practices can be shown to bridge the gap between early engagements and later abilities, without presupposing the very abilities that they are supposed to account for. A key issue here is the normativity inherent in requesting, proferring and inferring reasons. I point out that normativity is not a property only of linguistic interactions. Normativity and conventionality are also materially instantiated in the artefactual objects that are most frequently implicated in early triadic engagements. The conventional, canonical functions of artefacts may, however, be overlaid in symbolic play by significations rooted in children's experience of blended actual and virtual worlds. Artefactual objects are amplifiers, as well as objects of consciousness. Interwoven with the symbolic forms of language, they co-constitute a specifically human biocultural niche, within and in virtue of which developing human beings become competent folk psychologists.
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It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this... more
It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and structured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at the constructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.
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Resumo: No campo da linguística conceitual, grande número de pesquisadores e estudiosos assume que existe um domínio conceitual natural e pré-linguístico acerca da noção de tempo e que a organização linguística deste conceito é... more
Resumo: No campo da linguística conceitual, grande número de pesquisadores e estudiosos assume que existe um domínio conceitual natural e pré-linguístico acerca da noção de tempo e que a organização linguística deste conceito é universalmente estruturada através de mapeamentos metafóricos do léxico e da gramática do espaço e do movimento. O objetivo deste trabalho consiste em reconsiderar tal concepção, com base em pesquisa realizada na língua e na cultura do povo amondawa, habitante da região central do estado de Rondônia, na Amazônia brasileira, falante de uma língua Tupi-Kawahib, da família Tupi-Guarani, Tronco Tupi. Como metodologia de trabalho foram adotadas a pesquisa observacional e a coleta de dados linguísticos em trabalho de campo. Os dados foram submetidos à análise linguística estrutural e conceitual, com vistas a localizar, no nível da construção linguística, possíveis indícios de mapeamentos espaço-temporais. A análise sugere que o mapeamento espaço-tempo, no nível da construção linguística, não é um traço da língua amondawa e que este tipo de mapeamento não é empregado quando os indígenas falam na sua língua materna.
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In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents an overview of topics ranging from language in children’s play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism. The... more
In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents an overview of topics ranging from language in children’s play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism. The intertwining of the evolutionary and individual time scales of human development is a key theme unifying the lectures, as is the fundamentally cultural nature of language and cognition.
Familiar topics in cognitive linguistics, such as spatial semantics and conceptual blending, are addressed from these cultural, comparative and developmental perspectives. Chris Sinha also discusses the psychological roots of key concepts in cognitive linguistics, and sets out a biocultural approach to language evolution.
Familiar topics in cognitive linguistics, such as spatial semantics and conceptual blending, are addressed from these cultural, comparative and developmental perspectives. Chris Sinha also discusses the psychological roots of key concepts in cognitive linguistics, and sets out a biocultural approach to language evolution.