The Meaning Construction Of Time Conceptualizations Within The Theory Of Lexical Concepts And Cognitive Models

Since time is one of the most fundamental existences on the earth, it has aroused interests and explorations of many scholars ranging from Philosophy, Physics to Literature. In recent years, with the burgeoning development of cognitive science, time also receives much attention from linguists. Among all these researches in linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 has made an extraordinary contribution for us to understanding the concept of time. However, conceptual metaphors are asymmetric mappings of different domains stored in our long-term memory, but language meaning is changeable in nature. Thus, this thesis will first choose 5,000 sentences containing'time'from British National Corpus (or BNC for short) and 5,000 sentences containing'??'from the Center for Chinese Linguistics (or CCL for short) as the analyzing data. In the second place, after consulting nine authoritative dictionaries (including Oxford Advanced Learner s Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Collins COBUILD Advanced learner's Dictionary, Webster s New Collegiate Dictionary, the Chinese Etymology Dictionary, the Grand Chinese Dictionary, the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary and Xinhua Dictionary) and making an analysis of the 10,000 sentences from the two corpora, this thesis will employ three Meaning Criteria (Evans,2005) to establish the semantic networks of time in both English and Chinese. In the third place, the freeware AntConc3.4.4 and Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP for short) (Pragglejaz,2007) will be applied to identify time metaphors and time metonymies, and 13 typical cases will later be picked out to undergo meaning construction within LCCM theory.This thesis aims to answer three questions:(1) What are the semantic networks of time in English and Chinese respectively? (2) How can time metaphors and time metonymies in English and Chinese be understood within the LCCM theory? (3) Are there any similarities in the way people conceptualize time in English and Chinese?With the support of LCCM theory, the conclusions are as follows:(1) The semantic network of time in English involves six related lexical concepts, they are:the Matrix sense, the Duration sense, the Moment sense, the Event sense, the Occasion sense and the Measurement system sense; the semantic network of time in Chinese includes the Matrix sense (???), the Duration sense (???), the Moment sense(?? ?), the Event sense (???) and the Measurement system sense (???). (2) Like other sorts of figurative languages, a conception of time conceptualization arises when a semantic clash occurs among the primary cognitive model profiles and subjects to further search in the secondary cognitive models. The meaning construction process of time metaphor involves the integration and the interpretation process, while that of time metonymy involves the selection process. (3) Great similarities are found in English and Chinese time conceptualizations. From the analyses above, we can find cases like Time-for-Event metaphors, Time-for-Object metaphors, Time-for-Agent metaphors, Activity-for-Activity Time metonymies, Spatial Distance-for-Temporal Distance metonymies and Time-for-Event metonymies in both English and Chinese languages. This phenomenon might due to human beings' common experience towards time.