A Comparative Study Of The Spatialization Of Time Between English And Chinese

Time and space are two basic but important categories in philosophy and linguistics. There is an impressively large literature relating to time and space across a number of disciplines, such as philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and so on.Particularly, spatio-temporal cognition has been one of the hot issues in cognitive linguistic field. It has been widely acknowledged that time is more abstract than space,in that space can be talked and reasoned about on its on terms, whereas time is conceptualized, in most case, by virtue of other concepts. Lakoff and Johnson in their1980’s magnum opus Metaphors We Live by pointed out that construction and representation of time in human mind and language are the product of metaphorical thinking. Time is conceptualized almost in metaphorical terms. Spatial concepts are indispensable to us in conceptualizing time. Anthropologist Alverson(1994) claims that our experience of time is grounded in the experience of space, and the phenomenon of spatialization of time is across languages. Lakoff(1993) makes a deep investigation of spatialization metaphors of time in English, and summarizes two sub-categories: Moving Time metaphor and Moving Ego metaphor. Both the two sub-categories involve an imaginary time experiencer and the orientation of time.Lakoff asserted that English has the imaginary time experiencer always facing toward future. Other researches(see Alverson, 1994; Moore, 2000; Nuenz & Sweetser, 2006,Gaby, 2012) have shown that the orientation of time differs from language to language and from one culture to another. Likewise, in the inquiry of temporal cognition from linguistic perspective, Evans(2013) pays attention to the phenomenon of temporal references, and provides a taxonomy of temporal frames of reference,including deictic temporal frames of reference, sequential temporal frames of reference, and extrinsic temporal frames of reference. According to Evans, different temporal cognition models are encoded in distinct temporal frames of reference,hence facilitate various temporal relations: a past/present/future relation, a earlier/later relation, and a matrix relation.In the light of Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor theory and Evans’ s Temporal Frames of Reference, this research provides a comparative study of the spatialization of time between English and Chinese based on the British National Corpus(BNC) and the CCL corpus(online corpus designed by Center for Chinese Linguistic Peking University), as well as authoritative dictionaries such as Modern Chinese Dictionary, Cihai, Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary,and so on.This research is concerned with temporal expressions encoding temporal frames of reference in English and Chinese, the metaphorical orientation of time represented in the two languages, and the sources of similarities and differences in temporal cognition between English and Chinese.Through the research, it is found that three temporal frames of reference exist in both English and Chinese. In addition, both English and Chinese has an imaginary time experiencer facing toward future in the Moving Time and Moving Ego metaphors. However, in some cases, Chinese has the time experiencer facing toward past. It is also found that both English and Chinese can map time onto the three spatial axes: the horizontal axis(from front to back), the vertical axis(from up to down), the lateral axis(from left to right). Horizontal mapping is prominent in both English and Chinese. But in the respect of vertical mapping, it is more prevalent in Chinese than in English. Finally, although recent research has shown that the lateral mapping can found the mental reality in English speakers when they reason about time, this kind of mapping has no manifestation in spoken English. Generally, Chinese uses spatial concepts more frequently in the conceptualization of time than English.Conclusively, similar body structure and spatial experience give rise to the spatialization of time, however, diversities in culture and life experience across nations result in different ways in which time is conceptualized. Thereupon, the research presented will contribute to our ongoing investigation of temporal cognition as well as cross-cultural communication.