Language, culture, and space-time mapping

Space and time are frequently considered to be universal, transcultural domains of human language and thought, and the language of space, time, and motion has been intensively researched in recent decades. Space is widely viewed as the principal source domain for the linguistic and conceptual structuring, through metaphoric mapping, of time. At lexical and constructional levels, the spatial and temporal domains are closely related. In many languages, temporal meanings have been shown to be expressed by words and construction types whose primary meanings are analysed as being spatial. Typological studies have shown that lexical space-time mapping is indeed widespread ( Haspelmath 1997 ), and constructional space-time mapping been analysed in languages as typologically and geographically disparate as English ( Clark 1973 ; Lakoff and Johnson 1999 ), Aymara (South America: Núñez and Sweetser 2006 ), Chinese ( Yang Sinha and Filipovic 2023 ; Yu 1998 , 2012 ), and Wolof (West Africa: Moore 2006 ).