Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

Are there universal as well as culturally particular experiences and expressions of "time"? Hoyt 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 time in fundamentally similar ways.

Semantics and Experience 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.