Vera Da Silva Sinha

University of Oxford | OX · Department of Experimental Psychology

Our aim in this chapter is to critically examine the sciences of language as practices/theories in a complex of inter-related social, cultural, political and ideological ecologies. The specific topic around which we try to disentangle and illuminate this web of practice/theory is the study of endangered (especially, Indigenous minority) languages a...

This review essay addresses 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. We situate our research findings on concepts of time in indigenous societies of Amazonia in this broad inter...

This chapter explores the multiple ways in which human cultures and languages conceptualize time. We discuss the very notion of time from different perspectives as well as through the comparison of well-studied languages with lesser-known ones. Our focus is on concepts of time in three indigenous languages and cultures of Brazil: Huni Kuĩ, Awety, a...

In this paper we address ontological metaphorical linguistic expressions in a Brazilian Tupian language and culture, based on conceptual metaphor theory. We focus on metaphors of personification and body part constructions in the Amondawa language; analyzing examples from retellings of mythical narrative texts and from complex sentences and compoun...

The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selecte...

This article reports a field study of event-based time concepts, their linguistic expression and their use in time reckoning practices in three indigenous cultures and languages of Brazil: Huni Kuĩ (Pano, NorthWest Amazonia), Awetý and Kamaiurá (Tupi Guaraní; Xingu National Park). The results are based on ethnographic observation, interview, conver...

Time in Culture is a short documentary that shows how ideas of time are expressed in different cultures and languages. In Western cultures time is measured by clocks and calendars using numbers. Calendars and clocks enable us to measure time intervals: years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. The past is thought of as located behind our bac...

Neste trabalho, contestamos a Hipótese do Mapeamento Universal com baseem pesquisa realizada com uma língua Tupi-Kawahib, da Amazônia brasileira: a língua amondawa. Salientamos, entretanto, que não contestamos a hipotética universalidade dos fundamentos cognitivos do mapeamento linguístico espaçotempo.

Linguistic theory has been preoccupied since midway through the twentieth century with the search for universals of language. However, more recently there has been increasing attention across the different disciplines that contribute to research in language to variation and difference. This goes together with a more recent focus on culture and lang...

It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both o...

It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both o...