The Emotional Meanings Of Time Words From The Perspective Of Critical Cognitive Linguistics

Time is the most basic abstract concept in daily life and it has always been the research focus of linguistics and philosophy.In order to acquire a better understanding of time,many scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of researches on the concept of time and specific time words.In the field of linguistics,Evans(2013)proposes three types of temporal reference frames:referential,sequence,and absolute,constructing three kinds of temporal relationships:past,future,present;before and after,and matrix relationships,which contributes to a better understanding of the concept of time.At the same time,in the field of Cognitive Linguistics,the research on time metaphor and metonymy also facilitates the understanding of time.The metaphor and metonymy theory in the studies of Cognitive Linguistics are mainly to analyze metaphorical and metonymic thinking patterns in people's daily life.Moreover,the advantage of Critical Cognitive Linguistics lies in the employment of metaphor and metonymy as the research path for critical analysis of language structure to reveal the ideology behind the language structure.The ideology belongs to the philosophical category and refers to the understanding and recognition of things.Cognition can be divided into social cognition and personal cognition.Personal cognition will inevitably involve people's views,attitudes and personal emotions on things.In addition,there are few researches on the emotional meanings of specific time words.Hence,this thesis from the perspective of Critical Cognitive Linguistics employs metaphor and metonymy as research approaches,with the help of the British National Corpus(BNC)and the Center for Chinese Linguistic Peking University Corpus(CCL),as well as some authoritative dictionaries such as Oxford Advanced English-Chinese Dictionary,Modern Chinese Dictionary,Ci Hai and other online dictionaries,and further explores the emotional meanings of temporal expressions in English and Chinese with the two types of time word denoting the past,present,future and spring,summer,autumn and winter.This thesis is concerned with whether these two types of temporal expressions have emotional meanings in people's cognition,which type of emotional cognition is presented in discourse,and what similarities and differences are in the emotional cognition of temporal expressions in Chinese and English.Through research,it is found that(1)two kinds of time words have certain emotional meanings in Chinese and English discourses,and which formalize mappings of emotional metaphors and emotional metonymy on time words;(2)these emotional meanings of temporal expressions are presented in the form of metaphor and metonymy based on embodied experience and physical perception,which gradually internalizes in human emotional cognition;(3)The degree of emotional cognition on temporal expressions denoting four seasons of spring,summer,autumn and winter time is more obvious than that of time words denoting the past,present and future;(4)Frequency of temporal expressions' emotional meanings in poetry and prose is higher than that of the emotional meanings of time words in general discourse.