Do Left and Right have Temporal Meaning?

space and time, which, strictly speaking, is not the same as a spatial conception of time. We clearly benefit from studying how people take their understanding of sequence from reading/writing and apply it to other instances of sequence. A next step will be to determine which aspects of the LR or RL configurations are meaningful and what they mean. Núñez and Sweetser (2006) could say that a gesture to the front meant “in front of ego” partly because the gesture correlated with a word for front. Of course it is part of the value of work like de Sousa’s that the data are largely independent of language, but as we continue we will want to know how the conceptual structure revealed by data like those in de Sousa’s paper relates to the conceptual structures that people have in mind when they talk about sequence.