A Contrastive Study of Temporal-spatial Metaphor between Chinese and Americans

Abstract

Psychological time orientation includes past, present and future. Spatial-temporal metaphor tends to be used for understanding the abstract temporal concept. Chinese adopt "Time-moving Metaphor", in which the future is in the back and the past is in the front. In A mericans' "Ego-moving Metaphor", front is assigned to the future and back to the past. The paper makes a contrastive study of Static Past-oriented Chinese and Dynamic Future-oriented Americans. The difference is closely related to the ideology, cultural tradition and language system.