A Comparative Study Of Time-as-space Metaphor Between English And Chinese

For most of us, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is comparedwith another by saying that one is the other. Just as the Encyclopaedia Britannica putsit:“metaphor is a figure of speech that implies comparison between two unlikeentities, as distinguished from simile, an explicit comparison signaled by the words‘like’ or ‘as’”. However, a new view of metaphor that challenged all these aspects ofthe powerful traditional theory in a coherent systematic way was first developed byAmerican linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in1980in their seminal study:Metaphors We Live By. Their conception has become known as the “cognitivelinguistic view of metaphor.” This theory has achieved the "cognitive turn" ofmetaphor study (Steen,1994:3). As Lakoff claims, metaphor is widespread in oureveryday life, not merely in language but also in our thought and behavior. The studyof metaphor has penetrated into several fields at present, and spatial metaphor is oneof the central subjects in linguistic study. Spatial metaphor is an image schematicmetaphor, which maps the image-schematic structure of the source domain onto thatof a non-spatial domain (Lakoff&Johnson,1980). As time is often regarded as anabstract concept, it is actually impossible for us to conceptualize time through spacewithout metaphor.Based on our systematic study, we can get the following conclusions:On the one hand, time-as-space metaphor shares close similarities betweenEnglish and Chinese, as presented below:1) Although English and Chinese have their own different experiences ofexpressions at the linguistic level, at the conceptual level they share similarconceptual mappings, that is, the mappings from concrete spatial concepts to abstracttemporal concepts.2) In both English and Chinese, there exists three basic cognitive models forconstructing the spatial concepts of time,“time-moving metaphor”,“ego-movingmetaphor” and “time and ego moving in the same direction”. On the other hand, time-as-space metaphor also has certain differences betweenEnglish and Chinese, as listed below:In terms of orientation, the Chinese observer may be oriented either towards thefuture or the past, whereas the English observer is only future-oriented. This is asalient difference concerning conceptual metaphor between the two cultures.We hold that the above similarities in time-as-space metaphor between Englishand Chinese do not arise by accident, but are rather derived from the similar cognitiveabilities and experiences; As for the distinction, the reasons could be explained inrelation to different thought patterns and cultural models. Finally, it must be pointedout that this study is still limited in breadth and depth. It is indispensable to collect alarge number of corpus to demonstrate the validity and rationality of conclusion.