An In-depth Chinese-English Contrastive Study Of Spatial-temporal Metaphor

Space and Time, as two basic philosophical notions, have been studied and discussed for centuries. Both Chinese philosophers and thinkers and western scientists have shown their concern to the discussion of space and time. As early as the Spring-Autumn and the Warring States periods, Laozi and Shi Jiao have raised the notion of "YU" and "ZHOU". Based on the observation of different periods of development of different cultures, it is obvious that space and time occupy different positions in humans' conceptualization of the world. Temporal concepts can be understood as results of the mapping from the source domain of space onto the target domain of time. Thanks to the vehicle of spatial metaphor, abstract notions can find representations and explanations. Spatial metaphor serves as an important means to represent temporal concepts.This paper attempts to compare spatial-temporal metaphor patterns in Chinese and English based on a comparison of instantiation of spatial-temporal metaphor of QIAN/HOU and FRONT/BACK concepts on the lexical level. Differences of the temporal concepts cognition between the two languages have been found and philosophical and cultural causes for the differences have been explained and discussed.Chinese speakers regard temporal sequence as one concept and an obvious continuum in which the past is joined to the future at the present. They tend to adopt the static past-oriented cognition to observe and express time. In contrast, in English speakers' mind, the time line is divided at the present into the past and future, which are two separate concepts requiring different perspectives. They tend to instantiate a dynamic future-oriented cognition more frequently. The two languages differ in their conceptual instantiation and usage frequency.This paper is an attempt to carry out the cross-cultural research from macroscopic and microscopic, superficial and deep perspectives. We first analyze the coming and significance of the spatial-temporal metaphor from a macroscopic perspective. Then different conceptual instantiation and usage frequency of spatial-temporal metaphor between Chinese and English are elaborated on from a microscopic perspective. Different usage frequency and preferences of cognitive patterns between the two languages are a reflection of their different cultural backgrounds and ideology. An explanation of the deep ideological and cultural causes of the differences is given at the end of the paper.This paper tries to provide an innovative approach to the cross-cultural study of Chinese-English spatial-temporal metaphor by combining both macroscopic and microscopic perspectives.