Text and temporality: Patterned-cyclical and ordinary-linear forms of time-consciousness, inferred from a corpus of Australian Aboriginal and Euro-Australian life-historical interviews

It is argued that autobiographical texts, such as life-historical interview s, provide the richest possible source of information about a person's temp orality and a culture's historical past. It is proposed that lime-conscious ness can be inferred from such texts. To this end, ethnographic and other s tudies of Australian Aboriginal time-consciousness were used to construct a seven-part model of patterned-cyclical time-consciousness. Turning these s even attributes of patterned-cyclical time-consciousness into their opposit es yields seven features of one-dimensional, ordinary-linear time-conscious ness, thereby establishing a structured temporal polarity. A lexical-level, content-analytic methodology, Neurocognitive Hierarchical Categorization A nalysis (NHCA) is introduced, in which folk-concepts of time from Roget's i nternational Thesaurus were used to construct wordlist indicators for 9 of the 14 definitional components. Then, using NHCA for a comparative analysis of texts consisting of life-historical interviews, earlier results of an e mpirical study were briefly re-presented. Australian Aborigines, compared t o Euro-Australian controls, used a significantly smaller proportion of word s for an index of ordinary-linear time bur a higher proportion of words for an index of patterned-cyclical lime, indicating a time-consciousness that is primarily patterned-cyclical rather than linear. Females were less linea r and more patterned-cyclical than males in both cultures. These cross-cult ural results contribute predictive validity to the proposed polarity of tim e-consciousness. Implications for the culture-and-cognition paradox and its resolution in dual-brain theory are addressed.