Rodriguez, Lydia

Preliminary Abstract: My research investigates the relationship between language, gesture, and thought in a community of Chol Maya speakers of Northern Chiapas, Mexico. It explores the ways in which notions of time are spatialized in speech-accompanying gestures. Specifically, my project addresses the question of whether gesture reflects generic thinking about time, or a linguistically mediated notion of time. To answer this question, in my project I examine how the grammatical category that in Chol Maya is used to express temporal notions, aspect, is represented in Chol speakers' gestural repertoire.
Most of the existing research on the representation of time in gesture is based on work with languages that include grammatical tense among their strategies of time reference. In all of these studies however, the fact that time is given a linear representation, and that the speaker's body is a semantic anchor point is noteworthy. My research asks whether such representation of time in gesture is a human universal. Since all of the languages so far studied for gestural representation of time include tense in their grammatical repertoire, we cannot confidently propose an answer to this question. Linearity of imagistic representation of time across cultures could indeed be a universal in human thought. But grammatical tense also has a linear, deictic semantics, and we cannot rule out the possibility that linear temporal gestures simply reflect this fact. The critical test would come by studying temporal gesture in a language without grammatical tense, which is the case of Chol Maya, a non-tense language of Southern Mexico.