A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Time Concepts And TheirLinguistic Realizations

In 1980,Lakoff and Johnson published the book Metaphors We Live By,which interprets metaphor from a new cognitive perspective,and points out that metaphor is not only a rhetorical device,but also a way of thinking.The essence of metaphor is to use the familiar and concrete things to understand the abstract things that people are not familiar with.Human beings have no organs to perceive time,so we must understand time by means of metaphor.The author mainly discusses the cognitive metaphorical way of time concepts from five aspects,these are TIME IS GEOMETRIC FIGURE OR SOLID,TIME IS ORIENTATION,TIME IS CONTAINER,TIME IS HUMAN BEING and other novel metaphors.Based on the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this research makes a comparative analysis of the time concepts in English and Chinese.In order to further deepen our understanding of time concepts,to enrich the cognitive research of metaphor,and to promote the development of foreign language teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language,the author will be guided by the following three questions:1.What are the similarities and differences in English and Chinese time concepts?2.What are the similarities and differences in linguistic realizations of English and Chinese time concepts?3.What isrationality of the differences and similarities between the two languages?The author will use Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU(CCL)and British National Corpus(BNC)two corpuses and the Modern Chinese Dictionary,Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary,Cihai and other authoritative tools to collect instances of time concepts from two languages.By means of the qualitative,quantitative,and contrastive analysis,the author draws the following conclusions:1.English and Chinese express the concept TIME IS GEOMETRIC FIGURE OR SOLIDmostly by using spatial prepositions.However English has a larger number of prepositions,and it is more accurate than Chinese when expressingtime concepts.2.Both of two models,Moving Time Model and Moving Ego Model,exist in English and Chinese.However,in terms of time orientation,there are some differencesbetween these two languages in horizontal and vertical dimensions.Inhorizontal orientation,Chinese people often take PAST IS BEFORE,FUTURE IS AFTER time concept,while English people often adopt FUTURE IS BEFORE,PAST IS AFTER.When it comes to the vertical orientation,the frequency of using the concept UP/DOWN to express time in Chinese is much higher than that of in English.In Chinese,the language users often use UP to stand for the past things,and DOWN to stand for the future things.Hence it forms PAST IS UP,FUTURE IS DOWN time concepts in Chinese,whereas in English are FUTURE IS UP,PAST IS DOWN.3.When it comes to the conceptual metaphorTIME IS HUMAN BEING,English is more likely to use humanizing metaphors,while Chinese has the preference forconcretive metaphors.The author reveals the rationality of these similarities and differences,that is,similarity is derived from the common physical experience of human cognitive activities.However,these physical experiences are subject to the specific culture and society,which result in the differences.In conclusion,the research of the time concepts has an important practical significance in cognitive linguistics,linguistic typology,cross-cultural communication as well as in second language acquisition.