A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Time-as-Space Metaphor In English And Chinese

Experiential realism is the philosophy of cognitive linguistics and it represents the cognitive linguistic view of the nature of conceptualization. The cognitive approach to metaphor has replaced all the traditional approaches to metaphor, because although they have been able to shed light on various aspects of metaphorical phenomenon, they have all failed to recognize the fundamental conceptual nature of metaphor and the indispensable role metaphor plays in human conceptualization. Following the experiential view, the key of metaphor is to transfer our experience of well-known objects and events to less familiar categories, especially the abstract categories like"time". Nowadays, metaphors are no longer regarded as ornamental devices used in rhetorical style, but powerful tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories.As language reflects conceptual structure in important ways, it accordingly represents a crucial window into the human conceptual system. By examining the way in which language lexicalizes time, we will gain important insights into the conceptualization of time, the nature and organization of time and the similarities and differences between the ways different people develop their concepts via temporal metaphors. So the traditional dictionary-based approach is adopted as a major method for data collection. And some other approaches are also used to collect the necessary data in the thesis.The notion of time is presented in every language. For centuries, people have investigated the concept of time from many perspectives. Cognitive linguists point out the fact that very little of our understanding of time is purely temporal and that most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space. Time and space are two of the most basic factors in people's life. It has already been noted in various languages that the abstract notion of time has to be understood and expressed in terms of space. Thus on the basis of the contemporary theory of metaphor this thesis gives a deep illustration of spatial and temporal metaphors, especially of the contrastive study of Time-as Space metaphor in English and Chinese. And the similarities and differences between Time-as-Space metaphors in English and Chinese are discussed in detail in order to reveal the relationship between cognition and culture.At the end of this thesis, it is pointed out that in terms of both breadth and depth, this study is still very limited. It is necessary to do further studies to testify the conclusion, and some experiments, questionnaires as well as spoken and written discourses could be designed to provide the concrete data to provide the study with a sound base.