Decoding Time From Language: Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Temporal Expressions

Language is the carrier of the thoughts and it represents some general trends and tendencies of people speaking that language. Therefore some psychological features of the thoughts could be represented through language. Certain features in language usage might be explained psychologically.The temporal category is one important part in Chinese and English languages in which the temporal expressions are used frequently and widely in many different ways. Temporal language is often couched in spatial terms. This paper will investigate the psychological status of these temporal languages by carrying out temporal inferences in terms of spatial representation. The goal of this paper is to find the differences in the way of time thinking through comparing the temporal expressions in two languages.This is a contrastive study of the different ways in linguistic realization of the time in Chinese and English. The linguistic organization and structure reflects, at least partially, the nature and structure of thought, then language constitutes a key tool in investigating the nature of psychological structure—the nature and the principles in conceptualization of time. This paper will focus on the psychological presentation of time—the part of psychological structure related to the conceptualization of time, how time is expressed as revealed by the way time are encoded in language.The task of finding the differences in languages is carried out through comparing the linguistic expressions in Chinese which indicates a psychological distinction with the English expressions. Therefore the imbalances in presence or absence of the linguistic expressions for certain distinctions, the different ways to express the same distinctions are the interest of this paper.The basis of the current research is that temporal expression is linguistic location and the spatial terms are also needed here to construct the spatial image of time. All these are done for a better and clearer analysis of temporal terms and temporal events. Many elements concerning the description of time are also included in the image such as the time of speaking, the time of reference, and the direction of time. For a more precise depicting of time events, factors in situation are also taken into consideration, including speaker, hearer, and so on. The linguistic time does not always correspond to natural time. Linguistic time is the psychological time conceived by the speaker in communication with a subjective touch. Therefore from linguistic time, many implicit information can be found including time of utterance, time of hearing, temporal zero-point, orientation followed in the frame of linguistic time.This paper analyzed the temporal expressions concerned in English and Chinese, then certain tentative hypothesis was arrived and which was tested in the following experiments. The results of experiments show that two patterns of time-processing system exist in both languages; however, the dominant patterns are different in two languages. This is the reason that results in the different temporal expressions in two languages.The current issue is the beginning part of the analysis related to the implicit information referential from language. For the reason that results in the differences of temporal expressions, further research is needed. This is also the direction that the next research will follow.