لخّصلي

An examination of the lexical structure of languages throws some light on the
relations between various aspects of human conceptualization. Spatial relations and
their expression seem to lie very deep in the content of vocabulary. Words
referring to time are drawn metaphorically from spatial words with great
frequency: a long/short time, the near future, far ahead/separated in time.
Although time is a continuum, people readily divide it up into bits and record it
rather as they do materials extended in space: five years, three months, six seconds.
This last use of vocabulary may be a particular trait of European languages and
some others. An American Indian language is reported not to do this nearly so
readily; it uses cardinal numbers only for discrete, countable objects. A
separate class of words aligns the vocabulary of sequential time with that of
intensity, so repetition of the same activity again and again (to a European) is
rather the intensification of a single activity. Certain differences in cultural
attitudes and world outlook are said to accompany this kind of linguistic
difference.
Spatial terms are also freely used in the expression of other, more abstract
relationships: higher temperature, higher quality, lower expectations, summit of a
career, far removed from any sensible course of action, a distant
relationship, close friends, over and above what had been said. It has been
theorized that the linguistic forms most closely associated semantically with the
expression of relations - case inflections in languages exhibiting this category- are
originally and basically spatial in meaning. This “localist” theory, as it has been
called, has been debated since the beginning of the 19th century and probably
cannot be accepted as it stands, but the fact that it can be proposed and argued
shows the dominant position that spatial relations hold in the conceptualization and
verbalization of relations in other realms of thought. It has been maintained that the human brain has a preference for binary
oppositions, or polarities. If this is so, it will help explain the numerous pairs of
related antonyms that are found: good, bad; hot, cold; high, low; right,
wrong; dark, light; and so on. For finer discriminations, these terms can be put into
more narrowly specified fields containing more than two terms taken together, but
their most general use is in binary contrasts. Here, however, one term seems to
represent the fundamental semantic category in question. In asking about size, one
asks How big is it?; about weight, How heavy is it?; and about evaluation, How
good is it? It is possible to ask how small, how light, or how bad something is, but
such questions presuppose that the thing in mind has already been graded on the
small side, on the light side, or on the bad side.