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Abstract: Cultures around the world rely on basic spatial contrasts, such as front and back or left and right, for making sense of the world. These contrasts are used in space proper, as when we describe relative positions of objects (e.g., the pig is behind the cow) and also via metaphorical extensions as when we think of time spatially (e.g., he left his childhood behind). The Yupno of the mountains of Papua New Guinea make extensive use of contrasts in everyday language, but they are topographic in nature. A request for a dinner companion to “scoot to the right/left a little bit” would likely be expressed in Yupno as “scoot up/down a little bit.” Slope-based— or “topographic”— spatial reference systems appear to be commonplace in the languages of Oceania but their cognitive dimensions have gone largely unexamined. In this talk we begin to ask how topography ramifies through everyday language, life, and reasoning in the Yupno valley. After briefly describing the basics of topographic spatial contrasts— ups and down— and how they permeate the grammar, we will illustrate how these terms become extended beyond their most concrete uses. First, we will consider how such terms are used in an everyday but decidedly flat setting: inside the traditional Yupno house. Second, we will consider how ups and downs are recruited for thinking about temporal concepts like tomorrow and yesterday. This recruitment is evident to some extent in linguistic constructions but emerges with particular clarity and precision in the gestures Yupno speakers spontaneously produce when explaining temporal concepts. In general, future times are thought of as uphill and past times as downhill, irrespective of the orientation of the speaker. The Yupno topographic system presents a striking example of human linguistic and cognitive diversity, at the same time that it offers additional evidence of universally shared mechanisms of human abstraction. 

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Lectures and Seminars