Temporal Relations in Bakweri Oral Narratives

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most perplexing problems encountered in the construction of symbolic systems which purport to represent the real world in any way is how to represent time or, more accurately, the relations in time between events. But one can turn to any language one might have handy and find there readymade a coherent representation of the temporal relations between events. However, there is not any necessary agreement in how different languages describe the perception of time nor are the descriptions even simple. As Whorf (1939) has lucidly argued, turning from one's own language to another will, at first, reveal a bewildering difference in how time is perceived or talked about by the speakers of that language.