'Uphill' and 'downhill' in Tzeltal

Brown, Penelope; Levinson, Stephen C.

doi:10.1525/jlin.1993.3.1.46

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'Uphill' and 'downhill' in Tzeltal

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Brown, Penelope
Language Acquisition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Levinson, Stephen C.
Language and Cognition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). 'Uphill' and 'downhill' in Tzeltal. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 3(1), 46-74. doi:10.1525/jlin.1993.3.1.46.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0013-2BC1-5

Abstract

In the face of the prevailing assumption among cognitive scientists that human spatial cognition is essentially egocentric, with objects located in reference to the orientation of ego's own body (hence left/right, up/down, and front/back oppositions), the Mayan language Tzeltal provides a telling counterexample. This article examines a set of conceptual oppositions in Tzeltal, uphill/downhill/across, that provides an absolute system of coordinates with respect to which the location of objects and their trajectories on both micro and macro scales are routinely described.