A Cognitive Study Of BEFORE(前)/AFTER(后) Temporal Metaphors In English And Chinese

Experiential realism is the philosophy of cognitive linguistics and it represents the cognitive linguistic view of the nature of conceptualization. The cognitive approach to metaphor replaces all the traditional approaches to metaphor, for although they have been able to shed light on various aspects of metaphorical phenomenon, they have all failed to recognize the fundamental conceptual nature of metaphor and the indispensable role metaphor plays in human conceptualization. Following the experiential view, the key of metaphor is to transfer our experience of well-known objects and events to less familiar categories, especially abstract categories like "time". Metaphors are no longer regarded as ornamental devices used in rhetorical style, but powerful tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories.As time is often held to be the example of a so-called "abstract" concept par excellence, it is virtually impossible for us to conceptualize time without metaphor. Most of our understanding of time is a metaphorical version of our understanding of motion in space. Generally speaking, there are three universal models of time in the world, namely, the Moving Time metaphor, the Moving Ego metaphor, and the Time-Reference-Point metaphor. FRONT / BACK in space is projected into the time domain as BEFORE / AFTER and 前 /后 in English and Chinese respectively. When it comes to the time experiencer's orientation, most scholars hold that the experiencer always faces the future no matter whether he is stationary or moving. The main objectives are to testify the widely accepted view, to discover the similarities and differences between the ways the English and the Chinese develop their concepts via temporal metaphors, and to reinforce the claim that metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary, but are grounded in human bodily experience and daily knowledge.As language reflects conceptual structure in important ways, it accordingly represents a crucial window into the human conceptual system. By examining the way in which language lexicalizes time, we will gain important insights into the conceptualization of time, the nature and organization of time and the similarities and differences between the ways different peoples develop their concepts via temporal metaphors. So the traditional dictionary-based approach is adopted as a major method of data collection.This thesis is a comparative study of temporal metaphors in English and Chinese carried out within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Two groups of concepts, anteriority and past, posteriority and future, must be distinguished before the study. When the experiencer or ego is taken as the reference, he is co-locational with the present which produces two concepts the future and the past. The experiencer or ego's orientation determines FRONT/BACK in space domain. Therefore, FRONT can be assigned to the future if he is facing the future, or to the past if he is facing the past. The ego is not of necessity to understand posteriority and anteriority, for these two concepts have nothing to do with the present, the future and the past and only reflect the sequence of time units on the time-line. The focus of this study is to find whether the future is in front or the past is in front, therefore the reference frame is achieved with the experiencer or ego as the reference.The study reveals the similarities in the English and Chinese temporal metaphors as follows:1) There are three universal models for time in Chinese and English, i.e. the Moving Time metaphor, the Moving Ego metaphor and the Time-RP metaphor.2) Future times are in front of him / her, and past times are behind him / her. Therefore, the observer takes a front-to-the-future orientation.There are also differences:1) There is a fourth model for time in Chinese, in which both time and observer are stationary, and in which the future is behind the observer and the past is in front of him.2) The Chinese observer can take two different kinds of orientation in conceptualizing time, i.e. a front-to-the-future orientation and a front-to-the-past orientation.3) The front-to-the-past orientation is predominant in Chinese.At the end of this thesis, it must be pointed out that in terms of both breadth and depth, this study is still very limited. It is necessary to do further studies to testify the conclusion, and some experiments, questionnaires as well as spoken and written discourses could be designed to provide the concrete data to provide the study with a sound base.