Spatial Schema's Influence In Understanding The Spatial-Temporal Metaphor

Metaphor is not just a matter of language; on the contrary, it is a kind of cognitive style that is pervasive in everyday life. Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The essence of metaphor is mapping the structure of source domain, which is one kind of thing that is well informed and material, onto the target domain, which is comparatively abstract and always metaphorically conceptualized.Time is an invisible and untouchable thing, so we have no exactly perceptual apparatus for it. How do we express and understand it? Many linguistic researches have showed we often talk about time in terms of space. There are two distinct space-time metaphoric systems in English and Chinese: the ego-moving metaphor system and time-moving metaphor system. Still, we can't draw a conclusion that people think time through space only on such language materials. Here, we want to solve these problems: (1) whether the domains of space and time are conceptually correlated, (2) whether spatial schemas can be used to understand time, (3) and even, whether spatial schemas are necessary to understand time.There were two experiments designed for this purpose. In experiment I, spatial pictures have been used as priming questions to influence the online process of temporal sentences as target tasks. The hypotheses were that processing should be fluent if the expressions were consistent to the spatial schema, if not the processing should be disrupted. The result totally made the conclusion that domains of space and time are conceptually related. However, we still cannot confirm whether the relation meant merely the correlation or even the causation?In experiment 2, temporal sentences changed to be priming tasks and in turn, spatial pictures became target tasks. The manipulation was designed to investigate whether spatial schemas are necessarily accessed in thinking about time. In the event, participants were not influenced by temporal primes. And without spatial priming people understand temporal sentences directly. It turned out that spatial schemas were useful, but not necessary to think about time.The results of this research indicated that--space and time are definitely cognitively relative, and spatial relational information is useful for thinking of time, but with frequent use, which is unnecessary in thinking about time.