A Comparative Study Of Temporal Metaphor In Chinese And English From The Perspective Of Temporal Frames Of Reference

The conceptual metaphor theory refers that the metaphor is pervasive in our daily life,not just in language but in thought and action(Lakoff and Johnson,1980),building a bridge between thought and language.The conceptual metaphor theory consists of structural metaphor,orientational metaphor,and ontological metaphor.For over 30 years,many researchers studied temporal metaphor,in which time is target domain and the other concept is source domain,especially in temporal presentations and contrast of temporal metaphor in Chinese and English,leading to few studies in a comparative study of temporal metaphor in Chinese and English from the perspective of temporal frames of reference.The thesis analyzes similarities and differences of temporal metaphor in Chinese and English,drawing on temporal frames of reference,which are the research contents in the thesis.The temporal frames of reference include deictic temporal frame of reference(deictic t-FoR),sequential temporal frame of reference(sequential t-FoR),and extrinsic temporal frame of reference(extrinsic t-FoR),which represent according temporal relations,past and future,earlier and later,and matrix temporal relations.Based on their temporal relations,sample 1000 language data from British National Corpus(BNC)and Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL)are researched.Through subjective judgment of temporal relations for research language data,the frequency of temporal relations is compared to summarize similarities and differences of temporal metaphor in Chinese and English.Similarities are shown as follows: in deictic t-FoR,both Chinese and English face the future and turn their back to the past.Some spatial words in English mapping into temporal concept are equivalent to those in Chinese from the points of deictic and sequential t-FoRs,in which they express the same temporal relations.In addition,the frequency of temporal relations for each of high/gao and deep/shen is zero,in that,they do not present temporal relations on the vertical axis in sequential t-FoR.In extrinsic tFoR,time comes from clock,calendar or official setting in English and Chinese,in other words,time is described by objective existence.However,differences are much more than similarities of temporal metaphor in English and Chinese from the perspective of temporal t-FoRs and they only exist in deictic and sequential t-FoRs.Hence from the point of deictic and sequential t-FoRs,the author analyzes the differences of temporalmetaphor in Chinese and English from the perspective the t-FoRs.In deictic t-FoR,some Chinese face the past and turn their back to the future.In sequential t-FoR,differences are analyzed from transversal axis,sagittal axis and vertical axis.Through comparative analysis,new findings are found,earlier and later temporal relations in sequential t-FoR sometimes overlap past and future temporal relations in deictic t-FoR.Judgments of temporal relations are subjective in this study and some software can be expected to measure more precise data in the future.