A Study On Meaning Construction Of Time Through Proverbs

Time is automatically mechanicalized and linearized in the field of physics, while in philosophy, Immanuel Kant's"forms of intuition"view(1787) and Henri Bergson's"self evolution"view(Bertrand Russell, 1912) and Martin Heidegger's"Nichtungsform"view(George Steiner, 1978) and the others confine the time representation to the subjective intuition, lacking convincing evidence. In linguistics, George Lakoff explores (1980) the metaphorical concept of time and figures out the motivation of the metaphorical concept of time, but he does not touch on the mental process of the meaning construction of time. Correspondingly much research explains time or the construction of time, from purely Conceptual Metaphor Theory or Conceptual Blending Theory. Dissatisfied with the situation that few studies give a complete and thorough explanation of the whole mental process of meaning construction of time with clear and convincing diagrams, the thesis, from cognitive and psychological angle, intends to fulfill the task through analysis of both Chinese and English proverbs.Under the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Idealized Cognitive Model and Conceptual Blending Theory, the thesis studies meaning construction of time through proverbs containing TIME in both English and Chinese, collected from internet or relevant proverbs dictionaries. It aims to revelation of its intrinsic mechanism and cognitive working patterns. Based on the representation and analysis of the data, similarities between the English and Chinese are figured out as follows: firstly, as to the representation of time, an abstract concept, people tends to resort to the conceptual metaphor, that is, people are likely to use accessible items to represent the abstract concept, TIME. Secondly, basic category events and items are often chosen to represent time in the metaphorical concepts. Thirdly, in the process of meaning construction of time, several or even more cognitive models may be activated simultaneously and one or several of them can be fore grounded according to the purposeful end. Fourthly, the process of meaning construction of time is on-line, that is, the process can be altered as it unfolds. Meanwhile, there are also distinctions among them due to the different culture and ideology. The English tends to adopt monosource domain pattern while the Chinese bisource domain pattern in the representation of time through proverbs. Besides, the distinctions in the representation of time through proverbs manifest the different attitudes towards time in English and Chinese.The study is a conducive exploration of the linguistic theories into the representation of time, and it also consummates the representation of time from the linguistic perspective. The study offers a theoretical framework and practical model for the understanding and application of metaphorical phenomenon. The findings may also be applied to the language learning and teaching, which are helpful for the language learners to establish the metaphorical philosophy and they also can facilitate the language and culture learning.