A Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Temporality From A Cognitive Metaphor Perspective

Thought constrains language, meanwhile, language reflects thought andis the carrier of the thought, so language represents a crucial window into humanconceptual system. This thesis is to deal with the differences of temporality betweenEnglish and Chinese, so as to further clarify the relationship between language andconceptual system. According to contemporary theory of metaphor, metaphor is animportant cognitive instrument, pervasive and essential in language and humanthought and reasoning. The nature of conceptual metaphor is systemic mapping acrossconceptual domains.As time is abstract, cognitive linguistic points out that very little of ourunderstanding of time is purely temporal and that most of our understanding of time ismetaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space. After a quantitativestudy on temporal expressions in English, Lakoff reveals that the experience of time isbased on a general conceptual metaphor of time---TIME PASSING IS MOTION.There are two special cases, one is Time-Moving metaphor, in which the observer isstationary while times are entities moving with their fronts toward the observer; the other is Observer-Moving metaphor, in which times are fixed locations, and theobserver is moving through them. However, as the research goes on, especially whenit is tested in Chinese, some scholars made some amendments. They not onlydiscussed the flowing feature of time, but also stressed the sequencial feature of time.Both of the two cases under Lakoff’s modal stress the function of observer, who isfacing towards future, so we summarized his modal as Ego-Reference-Point metaphor,while the modal based on sequencial feature is called Time-Reference-Point metaphor,which does not have to consider the location of the observer, but the order of timeevents on time axis, the event that is in front is "earlier" in time than the event that isbehind.All the similarities and differences of metaphorical cognition in different nationscan be reflected in language. Based on predecessors, different temporal metaphoricalmodals that are respectively applicable to English and Chinese are summarized in thisthesis——ego-reference-point modal and time-reference-point modal, the former ismore applicable to English while the latter is more suitable for Chinese. To prove thisconclusion, the author made a quantitative analysis of “before” and “after” inEnglish and“前”and“后”in Chinese——the most representative conceptualinstantiation in spatial domain. However, the purpose of this thesis is not just to findout the differences of temporal metaphor between English and Chinese. Metaphor, asa way of thinking that is based on human experience. From thought to language thereexists a continuum which includes language system and linguistic expression. Sohaving searched out the temporal metaphorical modals from a lot of languagephenomena, the task falls to temporal system and temporal expressions. This thesis,with conceptual temporal metaphor theory as a framework, is to explore thesimilarities and differences between English and Chinese temporality. The thesispoints out that English people and Chinese people have the same way of forming timeconcept, that is, by mapping from space domain, but they bore different ways ofconceptualizing time, hence, the difference of temporality between English andChinese. English, influenced by ego-reference-point metaphor, takes absolute tense asits main temporality, in which past, now and future are clearly distinguished, relative tense as its complementary temporality. In contrast, Chinese, influenced bytime-reference-point metaphor, takes relative tense as its main temporality, whichstresses the relationship of E and R (E before R, E simul R or E after R), absolutetense as its complementary temporality.The two languages also showed great differences in temporal expressions. First,tense is judged by the inflections of predicate verb in English but auxiliary words ortime words in Chinese; Second, tense is definite in every English sentence, but inChinese, tense is often not certain until it goes into a test; Third, in English, syntax isthe main means of expressing temporality, lexicon, the subsidiary means, while inChinese, the contrary is the case; Fourth, the referent points in English tense arealways fixed, relating with “now” in time axis, while in Chinese, the referent pointstend to shift from “now” to “past” and “future”.