Vera da Silva Sinha & Chris Sinha

On September 8th, Vera da Silva Sinha (University of York) and Chris Sinha (University of East Anglia/Southwest University, Chongqing/Hunan University) will give two seminars on Mind and Language, within the scope of the activities of the Lisbon Mind, Cognition & Knowledge Group.

Programme

14:00–15:10

Vera da Silva Sinha & Chris Sinha
Time and Events — in language, mind and world

In this talk, we address the long-standing problem of the nature of time in life, mind, language and world, a problem often viewed as intractable. Our approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on natural, life, social and cognitive sciences as well as language sciences. We situate our research findings on concepts of time in indigenous societies of Amazonia in this broad interdisciplinary framework. We offer an account of event-based time, contrasting this with metric time, presenting highlights from the evidence that our research has unearthed attesting against the claimed universality of a “mental timeline” and of space-time metaphor. We present an evidence-based argument for the semantic and ontological primacy of events in the human conceptualization of the cognitive and semantic domain denoted in some languages by the word ‘time’ and its cognates.

KEYWORDS
Event-based time; metric time; space-time metaphor; mental timeline; temporal concepts

REFERENCES
Silva Sinha, V. da. (2019) Event-based time in three indigenous Amazonian and Xinguan cultures of Brazil. Frontiers in Psychology (Section Cultural Psychology) 10, 454 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00454

Silva Sinha, V. da. (2022) Time: Sociocultural structuring beyond the spatialization paradigm. In Völkel, Svenja and Nassenstein, Nico. Approaches to Language and Culture (Series Anthropological Linguuistics Vol. 1) 75-306. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726626

Sinha, C., Silva Sinha, V. da, Zinken, J. and Sampaio, W. (2011) When time is not space: The social and linguistic construction of time intervals and temporal event relations in an Amazonian culture. Language and Cognition, 3(1), 137-169. https://doi.org/10.1515/langcog.2011.006

Sinha C. (2014) Living in the Model: The Cognitive Ecology of Time—A Comparative Study. In Magnani L. (Ed.) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 8. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37428-9_4

Sinha, C. and Bernárdez, E. (2015) Metaphors, maps and fusions: Space, time and space-time. In Sharifian, F. (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. 309-324.

15:10–15:30

Coffee break

15:30–17:00

Vera da Silva Sinha & Chris Sinha
New Themes in Mind and Language

Chris and Vera will lead a discussion around two recent papers (both available from Robert Clowes and being circulated through the LMCK Group)

• Sinha, C. (2021). Artefacts, symbols, and the socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction.
• Sinha, C., & da Silva Sinha, V. (2023). Learning about, learning from, learning with–Towards a critical practice and theory of situated language sciences. In N. Gontier, A. Lock, & C. Sinha (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution.

To join the sessions on Zoom, use this link.