On the cultural character of metaphor: Some reflections on Universality and Culture-specificity in the language and cognition of time, especially in Amerindian languages

The paper is devoted to an analysis of the relation between language and culture in the context of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Section 2 deals in an explicitly critical way with some problems in the concept of “culture” as used in “mainstream” schools of CL. Section 3 offers a brief review of the problems involved in the studies on the concept of “time” and its metaphors. Section 4 reviews some interpretations of the concept of “time” in Amerindian cultures. Section 5 analyses the linguistic expression of time in Quechua, in an attempt to (dis)confirm the “past in front” conceptualisation proposed by some researchers for the (geographically and culturally close, but genetically unrelated) Aymara language. Some final conclusions follow.