A Cognitive Approach To Time As Space Metaphor

Metaphor has attracted the attention for scholars nearly in all fields, especially those of rhetoricians and literary critics for more than 2000 years. Yet in recent years, metaphor has become a focus of interest in cognitive linguistics. The researchers hold that metaphor is a fundamental way of human cognition rather than just a rhetorical device in traditional view. Rising in this change is the view that metaphor is not merely a matter of language, but a mode of thought and an effective cognitive tool for human to know abstract things in terms of concrete ones. Since space enjoys a privileged position as a foundational ontological category in language, and since the human conception of space seems to structure other parts of the conceptual system through metaphorical mappings, this study chooses to focus on TIME AS SPACE metaphor. TIME AS SPACE metapor is one of the pervasive conceptual metaphors by which people perceive and understand the complicated and abstract concepts. On the whole, this metaphor reveals that the spatial orientation plays an important role in people's understanding of time. This paper intends to give an analysis of the similarities between the concrete domain of space and the abstract domain of time and in which way and how time is understood and reasoned about through spatial terms.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One gives an overview to the historical background of the cognitive study of metaphor. Richard, Black and Lakoff are presented respectively. Their studies contribute a lot to clarify the cognitive mechanism of metaphor and pave the way of elaborating the relationship between space and time and how the later one is constructed in the term of the former one metaphorically.Chapter Two sets up the theoretical framework underlying the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphor, where the natural experience, image schema and the metaphorical mapping are evaluated. In this chapter, similarity, the creative base of metaphor is also illustrated and emphasized.Metaphor is the creation of similarity. By metaphorization, we can conceptualizeA as B. By seeing A as B, we can transfer the attributes of domain B onto domain A, and thus similarity between these two domains is created so that we could understand, experience, or reason about a new or abstract domain in terms of a better known or structured one. The TIME AS SPACE metaphor creates the similarity between space and time. Then what is the similarity between time domain and space domain? Why do people use spatial concept to conceptualize time? These two questions will be solved in Chapter Three. In this chapter, the definition and the categorization of time and the primacy and the dimensionality of space are elaborated respectively.Chapter Four makes a detailed analysis of how does time is conceptualized and shaped in terms of space from five aspects like: orientation of the time-line, shape of the time-line, position of time relative to the observer, sequences of time units, time as motion.Chapter Five illustrates the cultural connotation of TIME AS SPACE metaphor. Metaphor is not only a part of language, but a kind of phenomenon of culture. TIME AS SPACE metaphor, as one of the conventional metaphor pervasive in both Chinese and English language is also closely attached to the two cultures. And our physical and cultural experience provides many possible bases for TIME AS SPACE metaphor. That is to say there are similarities shared by these two languages in understanding the time concept, and they also differ in some side issues.Chapter Six summarizes the previous chapters and draws a conclusion.