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nization of the space around the body a point that Levinson and his colleagues have dis-
puted in numerous publications over the last 15 years or so.
The fact that the body is seen as having a vertical axis is manifested in the semantic
opposition between the head ( above all the other parts of the body ) and the legs ( below
all the other parts of the body ). It also fits in with the important role of the opposites
ABOVE and BELOW in numerous body-part concepts: chest (above) and belly (below),
back (above) and backside (below), forehead (above) and chin (below), and so on.
This concept of the verticality of the body explains why the standing posture is treated
in many languages as more basic than the lying one. For example, it explains why in English
a newborn baby can be described as 50 cm long whereas an adult cannot be described as
1.70 cm long (cf. Wierzbicka, 2006a). More generally, it explains the crucial role of the
concepts ABOVE and BELOW in the semantics of posture verbs like stand , sit and lie ,
that is to say, in the habitual interpretation of these postures reflected in the world s lan-
guages (cf. Newman, 2002), and, through extended uses of posture verbs, in the interpreta-
tion of the position and location of various objects in the world around us (objects that
stand or lie somewhere, and in English even sit ; cf. Wierzbicka, 2006a).
The fact that the body is seen as having two symmetrical sides, defined by the position
of the arms on two sides of the body (i.e., right and left ), supplies the ground for
distinctions like that between a wide path and a narrow path (what matters is,
roughly speaking, how much room one has on either side of the body).
The fact that the body is seen as having two asymmetrical sides, the front and the back,
supplies the ground for notions like going straight ahead , going forward , and even for
physical activity concepts like walk and run (cf. Wong et al., to appear).
Disputing the universal significance of Kant s three axes to the naïve human concep-
tion of the world, Levinson and Brown (1994, p. 32) contrasted a Kantian world with a
Leibnizian world , more compatible in their view with the facts from languages like Tzeltal:
. . .the Tzeltal facts point to a different conclusion. We can happily dispense with left/
right as the basis of the third plane in our naïve conception of abstract space. (. . .)
A. Wierzbicka / Language Sciences 29 (2007) 14 65 59
You can live consistently in a Leibnizian world, with space thought of merely as a
network of positions, provided you (. . .) stick firmly to the idea that a left hand
and a right hand have just the same shape.
But can human beings really live in a Leibnizian world , devoid of any body-centric
perspective altogether? After all, for normal human beings, what matters is not abstract
space , but the concrete place where they are: the scene in front of them, the ground under
their feet, the objects on both sides of their body.
Granted, the body-centric perspective on the world does seem to be more prominent in
some languages than in others (as documented by Levinson and his colleagues), and such
differences are indeed significant. But to conclude from this that some human groups live
in a Kantian world and others in a Leibnizian world is surely going too far.
The universals of body-part semantics may or may not include the concepts of right
hand and left hand , but they do include word-meanings with the component on two
sides of the body ( hands , arms ). They also include concepts broadly comparable to
chest and back , that is, to Kant s before (front) and behind (back).
To orient ourselves in the place where we are we need, first of all, to see what is in front
of us. We also need to see the ground under our feet and to take note of what can be seen,
and what is going on, on both sides of our body (those where the arms are). These are the
three planes that Kant was talking about. The universals of the semantic field of the
human body reflect the importance of these three planes.
We do not live, then, in a Leibnizian world , with space thought of merely as a net-
work of positions , but in a world in which, as Bryant et al. (1992, p. 97) put it, paraphras-
ing Kant, the space is (. . .) organized around the body rather than around other referents
in space . We also live in a world which we interpret through the prism of shape concepts
like long , round and flat all based on the concept hands , and physical property con-
cepts like hard , soft and sharp , which (as shown in Goddard and Wierzbicka, in press)
are also based on hands .
Human orientation in the world depends to a very large extent on sight and touch, that
it, on our eyes and hands. What people touch is, above all, the things in their hands and
the things in front of them; and what they see is, above all, what is in front of them. The
concepts of hands and eyes are vital to human language and cognition, and the semantic
universals of body-part terminology, which differentiate between the front and the back of
the body, and privilege the front, reflect this.
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