| The notion of time is presented in every language. For centuries, people have investigated the concept of time from either philosophical or formal perspective. The structure and characteristics of time are documented in detail by lots of philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and even linguists. The formal treatment of time articulates that time has such features as segmentability, inclusion, linear order, proximity, duration and origo, features to a large extent bearing upon more concrete and familiar concepts such as event and space. Cognitive linguistics points out that very little of our understanding of time is purely temporal and that most of our understanding of time is metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space. Therefore, it would be more reasonable and persuasive to investigate the notion of time from the cognitive perspective. More exactly, the cognitive understanding of metaphor, or the contemporary theory of metaphor, would provide a solid and forceful framework to study the notion of time.Studies of metaphor have undergone roughly two stages: metaphor as linguistic entities and metaphor as a cognitive mechanism. The contemporary theory of metaphor, the birth of which is marked by the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's seminal book Metaphors We Live By, holds the stance that metaphor is an important cognitive instrument pervasive and essential in language and human thought and reasoning. According to this cognitive understanding of metaphor, conceptual metaphors are systematic mappings across conceptual domains. Each metaphorical mapping at the conceptual level is a fixed set of ontological correspondences between entities in the source domain and those in the target domain. Once the fixed correspondences are activated, mappings can project source domain inference patterns onto target inference patterns, resulting in epistemic correspondence (Lakoff, 1993). Systematicitiy is characteristic of conceptual metaphors. By systematicity we mean people use metaphorical expression in a systematic way because our metaphorical concepts are systematic. In addition, metaphorical mappings do not occur isolated from one another. They are sometimes organized in hierarchical structure, in which "lower" mappings in the hierarchy inherit the structure of the "higher" mapping. Inheritance hierarchy is another striking feature of conceptual metaphor system.Based on the cognitive understanding of metaphor, Alverson (1994) conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic investigation of time metaphor. His research reveals the assumption that the experience of time is based on a universal template of spatial-hence the spatialization of time in languages. Lakoff s model specifies two special cases in English under a general conceptual metaphor of time-TIME PASSING IS MOTION. One is Time Moving metaphor (Case 1) in which the observer is fixed, and times are entities moving with their fronts toward the observer. Another is Observer Moving metaphor (Case 2) in which times are fixed locations, and the observer is moving through them. Lakoff also observed the "duality" phenomenon where simultaneous mappings may mix the two special cases in single expression (1990,1993,1994).Actually, in Chinese time is conceptualized systematically in terms of space just as in English. Specifically, we have found that the two special cases-Case 1 and Case-specified by Lakoff for the metaphor system of time in English are properly applicable inChinese.In the Chinese lexicon, the words for "past" literally mean either "something that has passed by the stationary observer" or "something left behind by the traveling observer". The words for "present" characterize it as "right with the observer", especially as "right before the observer's eyes or face." Therefore, the present is the time the observer is "seeing" right before him. This characterization of the present time is suitable to both Case 1 and Case 2. The words for "future" have trie literal senses of either "something that has not yet come but w...
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