Spatial experience and temporal metaphors in Wolof: Point of view, conceptual mapping, and linguistic practice

This dissertation is about relationships between language, thought, and experience, focusing on Wolof, a Niger-Congo language. In Wolof and English, the ways people talk about temporal experience are structured to a great degree by the logic and vocabulary of spatial experience. I argue that the similar semantic structures in Wolof and English are based on conceptual metaphors (Grady 1997, Lakoff and Johnson 1980 etc.) for temporal structure, systematic mappings of certain concepts that emerge in scenarios of motion and location onto temporal concepts. Wolof speakers and English speakers share these conceptual mappings because they are based on recurring correlations in experience that are part of daily life in rural Senegal as well as the urban United States, and presumably all over the world.; The nature of these correlations, including considerations of point of view, offers motivations for why particular spatial vocabulary is mapped onto temporal concepts the way it is. In some cases, significant crosslinguistic trends can be predicted. However, lexical-semantic differences between languages are also crucial.; Some metaphors are more or less directly motivated by experiences a person of any culture might have, while other motivations have to do with concepts that are culture-specific to varying degrees (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). In one case of culture-specific temporal conceptualization, I show that Wolof and English have fundamentally different concepts in the area involved. This is a case in which language is "inextricably interwoven" with thought (Sapir 1921)---the concepts in question only exist as part of a system that includes the particular language the concepts are expressed in (cf. Whorf 1956).; While there is a substantial amount of metaphor structure that is shared crosslinguistically, a full understanding of conceptual metaphor depends on properties of particular languages, communities of speakers, or individuals. Metaphor structure interacts with language use in important ways, and considerations of linguistic practice (Hanks 1990, 1996) have much to do with the nature of metaphorical language and plausibly with the structure of particular conceptual metaphors.