A Contrastive Study Of Mental Rotations In Spatial-Temporal Locative Metaphors Between Chinese And English

Spatial conceptualization of time is pervasive across languages and cultures,which is part of embodied cognitive process in human beings.It is known that space has three dimensions in which locatives are located.Spatial-temporal metaphor(TIME IS SPACE metaphor)directs how conceptual mapping from the spatial domain to the temporal domain works.Usage of locative in space for indicating dimensions ensures the utilization of locative in time,in which the conceptual mapping functions.And it is worth mentioning that studies of spatial construals of time have been carried out,all showing that Chinese talks about time vertically more often than English.This study checks the existence of mental rotations in the understanding of temporal concepts.Furthermore,the internal working mechanism is also explored through the analysis of linguistic evidence from corpora and sign language dictionaries.In light of theoretical framework constructed in this study which combines Embodied Cognitive Linguistics(ECL)with mental rotation,the study has found that there are one kind of elaboration in Chinese,vertical to horizontal,and one type of elaboration in English,lateral to horizontal.What is discovered further proves the typicality of vertical dimension in Chinese and horizontal axis in English.“Zero elaboration” is proposed to include all other cases.In this way,the hypothesized theoretical framework is reconstructed in accordance with real situations in Chinese and English.And the similarities and differences of mental rotations in spatial-temporal locative metaphors are analyzed.Findings in this study make the spatial-temporal cognitive system more elaborate and specific,which further verifies the existence of lateral spatial-temporal metaphor in Chinese and English.And the revelations in this contrastive study can produce some implications not only for foreign language teaching,but also for cross-cultural communications in terms of mutual understandings of language and culture.