The Cognitive Study Of Spatial Metaphor For Understanding The Conception Of Time In Second Language

Metaphor exists in all aspects of human thought and behavior,and is an indispensable part of language.It is not a "heterogeneous" or "biased" language.The conceptual system of human beings is metaphorical.The first generation of cognitive science began in the 1950s.It is Disembodied Cognition.It believes that categories,characteristics,relationships,etc.are objectively independent of human consciousness,and have nothing to do with embodied experience.The second generation of cognitive science emerged in the 1970s and sharply criticized the first generation of cognitive science.It is Embodied Cognition.The key point is that concepts,categories,and minds are derived from body-basic experience Humans perceive everything through their own body structures.In human conceptual system,the complicated logical reasoning is derived from embodied experience.The embodied experience is mapped to the abstract things via metaphor.Lakoff&Johnson(1999)also said that our majority understanding of time is a metaphor for our understanding of space movements.which is a time-space metaphor.The ion of time determines that it is understood by the way of spatial metaphor.Sun Yi(2013)pointed out that spatial metaphors are produced earlier and are the basic metaphors for people to survive and can be directly understood by people.Time-space metaphors have been confirmed in different languages.At present,there are three problems in the study of time-space metaphor:First,the current research is directed at the alphabetic characters represented by English,and the Chinese language research is limited.Especially the Chinese as a second language research is very limited.Second,the current research does not examine whether the language background has an impact on native speakers for the time-space metaphor cognition Third,the influencing factors of time-space metaphor of current studies are unilateral.lacking a comprehensive analysis from the perspective of cognition,language and culture.In summary,I refer to the experimental paradigm of Boroditsky(2000,2001),and examine the time-space metaphor of English-chinese bilinguals in Chinese and English background through two experiments.The experimental results are explained from the perspectives of cognition,language acquisition and national culture.Experiment 1 examines the processing of time-space metaphors by English-chinese bilinguals in Chinese background.The experimental results show that the difference between the reaction time in the horizontal space and the vertical space is significant.The former is slightly shorter than the latter.The main effect of the sentence type is not significant.It can be seen from the above that when using Chinese,the bilinguals exhibit the characteristics of time-space metaphor processing that is different from that of native English speakers,and also different from the time-space metaphor processing characteristics of Chinese native speakers.Therefore.English-chinese bilinguals understand time-Spatial metaphor is based on the dual experience of both mother tongue and second language in the Chinese background.Experiment 2 examines the processing of time-space metaphors by English-chinese bilinguals in English background.The experimental results show that English-chinese bilinguals have shorter response in horizontal space initiation conditions,and horizontal time representation sentences have the shortest response time,which means bilinguals show English time-space metaphor processing characteristics,which is consistent with previous studies.It can be concluded that English-chinese bilinguals understand time-space metaphor is based on the native language experience in the English background.However,since the research on Chinese as a second language from the perspective of Embodied Cognition is very limited,and the research on time-space metaphor for Chinese as a second language is quite few,my research on time-space metaphor of English-chinese bilinguals is still in the exploration stage.Assumptions and conclusions of my research still need further related empirical validation and support.