The English Spatio-temporal Metaphor Orientation Of Non-English Major College Students

Relevant researches have proved that the concept of time is the result of the projection from the space domain to the time domain.It can be found that a large number of words expressing time come from the concept of space.Therefore,people usually use space to talk about time,such as “Autumn is approaching,” and “He left his misery childhood behind.” In many languages,there are two central metaphorical systems of spatial-temporal metaphor: MOVING EGO and MOVING TIME.However,different scholars hold different views on it.Gentner et al.(2002)find that English users’ cognition of time is mainly ego-moving metaphors rather than time-moving metaphors.Zhou Rong(2001),a Chinese scholar,test Chinese students with the help of Chinese materials,and come to the same conclusion as Gentner’s,and also prove the psychological reality of the two spatio-temporal metaphoric systems.However,Lai(2001)investigates that MOVING TIME is the primary metaphor of spatial-temporal metaphor.Besides,Li Heng and Zhang Jijia(2017)prove that Chinese speakers tend to use time-moving metaphors,while English speakers prefer to use ego-moving metaphors.Thus,this paper mainly tests non-English major Chinese students with English materials to investigate their perception and preferences of spatial-temporal metaphor.This experiment is a within-subjects design and the mode of the test volume models after Gentner et al.,and Zhou Rong.In this paper,82 non-English major students of Xi’an International Studies University are tested online with English materials.Each test result will record the response time and accuracy of each test.It uses 2x2 repeated measures AVONA in data analysis.The main results of this paper are as follows:(1)As for non-English majors,the cognition of spatial metaphor of time has the psychological reality;(2)For Chinese students,it is easier to understand and master time-moving metaphors than ego-moving metaphors;(3)The higher the English level,the higher the accuracy rate is,but the average reaction time is notnecessarily higher.The results from this test show that the student’s English proficiency only affects the accuracy rate but does not affect the mean reaction time;(4)Chinese students’ mother tongue will affect their judgment of the time relationship in English.