Rationale for the research
Many researches have shown that people often talk about time in terms of space Spatial expressions used here can be verbs (as we approach the end of the year, the coming month) or prepositions (in the days ahead of us, the worst is behind us) That people rely on the domain of space to conceptualize time such as: we are handing in our MA thesis before time, approaching the viva voce, or falling behind schedule means they are using space-time conceptual metaphor
(metaphor Time as Space) Playing an important role in conceptualizing time as space, the spatial prepositions (in, on, at, before, ahead of, behind, etc.) have been subject to many linguistic studies and thesis Of these, ‘in, on, at’ have been discussed in lots of articles and studies, while ‘before, behind’ have received less linguists and researchers’ attention When people stand between the worst days and the best days, can it be said that “the best day is before them” or “the best day is behind them”? How can people determine which statement is the best appropriate? Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate two spatial prepositions ‘before, behind’ in detail that how they reason time from cognitive perspective.
Aims of the research
The study is carried out to discover another aspect of metaphor Time as Space in which the spatial schemas of two spatial prepositions ‘before, behind’ are clarified Moreover, the research explores how these spatial schemas affect time conceptualization From those analysis, the mechanism the temporal statements using these spatial prepositions are interpreted.
Research question
The Research Question is: ‘How do the spatial prepositions before, behind conceptualize time?’, which is clarified through three sub-questions:
➢ What are the spatial schemas of before, behind?
➢ How do these spatial schemas affect time reasoning?
➢ By which mechanism the temporal statements using these spatial prepositions are interpreted?
Data source
The data in this study is collected from English books and stories which two prepositions before and behind sometimes appear and are used as spatial and temporal particles.
Scope of the research
Many studies have been done in the field of metaphor Time as Space
The subjects also vary from verbs to prepositions Within the limit of researcher’s personal ability and source of reference materials, this study focuses on two spatial prepositions: before, behind used as expressions of time.
Significance of the research
The research has significance on improving the understanding about cognitive linguistics in general and conceptual metaphor in particular, raising people’s awareness of the time reasoning, helping to figure out how people perceive the time when they use spatial expression, promoting knowledge about the certain subjects of the metaphor Time as Space, discovering and obtaining the motion models of specifically spatial-temporal expressions (before, behind) Besides, the research is also a useful material source for further studies, a necessary supplementary document for learning and teaching English prepositions.
Organization of the research
The study consists of three main parts:
Part I: Introduction, presents the rationale of the study, the objectives, the scope, the method, the significance and the organization of the study
Part II: Development, includes three chapters:
Chapter 1: Literature Review, reviews the theories of metaphor, conceptual metaphor Time as Space, and related previous studies on the metaphor Time as Space
Chapter 2: Methodology, describes the research method Moreover, this chapter gives detailed theoretical framework on metaphor Time as Space and shows two models for conceptualizing time
Chapter 3: Analysis and discussion, analyzes meaning network of two particles before and behind; analyzes two conceptual models of two prepositions behind, before, followed by discussion of findings
Part III: Conclusion, gives the summary of the research, its implications, limitations and suggestions for further studies
LITERATURE REVIEW
Definition of term (key constructs)
Concept: The general idea or meaning which is associated with a word or symbol in a person’s mind (“Longman dictionary of Language teaching and applied linguistics” (1992))
Conceptualization (Construal): The way in which people perceive, comprehend, and interpret the word around them (“Longman dictionary of Language teaching and applied linguistics” (1992))
Conceptual metaphor: The understanding of one range of concepts (the target domain) in term of another (the source domain) (“Longman dictionary of Language teaching and applied linguistics” (1992))
Time-moving system: A time-line is conceived of as a river or conveyor belt on which events are moving from the future to the past (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)
Ego-moving system: Ego or the observer’s context progresses along the time- line (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)
Image Schema: An image schema is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning (Mark Johnson, 1987) Image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context An image schema is a generalized, primitive mental abstraction used in reasoning to associate percepts with concepts
Landmark (LM): entity with respect to which some other entity moves
Trajector (TR): entity that moves with respect to a (relatively) stationary landmark
The notions of trajectory and landmark date back to the Gestalt psychology distinction between figure and ground Foregrounded parts in a scene or in a conceptual domain are call figure, and those which are downplayed are term ground Cognitive linguists like Talmy (1978), Fillmore (1985), and
Langacker (1987) have applied these notions to the description of language This has yielded a parallelism between figure and trajectory on the one hand, and between ground and landmark on the other Thus, the TR is the profiled or highlighted entity, while the LM merely acts as a reference point for the TR It usually happens that the LM is bigger in size and it gets a relative fixity of location, as opposed to the TR.
Theoretical background
Words constitute lexical forms that are conventionally paired with meanings, and that these form-meaning pairings are stored in a mental dictionary or lexicon The meanings of this set of words are clearly grounded at some level in our spatio-physical interaction with the world The various meanings associated with spatial particles are related in systematic and highly motivated ways In other words, we advance a polysemy approach to word meaning, arguing that the multiple, distinct meanings associated with the same lexical form are often related We suggest that the distinct but related senses associated with a single spatial particle constitute a semantic network organized with respect to a primary sense It has been widely assumed that meaning derives from the fact that language refers directly to the world The means whereby language ‘matches up’ with the world has relied on the notion of truth
According to the cognitive scientist Gilles Fauconnier, when language expressions reflect objective events and situations, as they often do, they do not reflect them directly, but rather through elaborate human cognitive constructions and construals’ Jackendoff has also supported that one of the most important insights to emerge from the work on perception is that our perceptions of the world are determined largely by conceptual organization being imposed on senseperceptory input That is, what we directly experience is not an objectively real world Rather, what we experience as everyday reality is mediated and shaped by human conceptual organization to which we necessarily and unconsciously subject sense-perceptory input
In general, the patterns and organization we perceive as reality do not in fact exist independently of the world itself, but are largely the result of our cognitive processing It is we who perceive it to be of something This is instructive as it demonstrates that although there is a world of sense-perceptory information out there, what we in fact perceive is determined by how we unconsciously organize and hence make sense of the input
Metaphor is said to play an important role in our conceptual structuring processes In particular, it is noticed that certain experiential metaphors which base on the feeling of spatial relations are available in people’s conceptual system In recent years another opinion has shown that metaphor plays a crucial role in the acquisition of new conceptual structure (Lakoff and Johnson 1980;
Martin 1990) From this, language is considered as metaphorical in nature; besides, metaphor is offered a main role in the development of conceptual structure Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have convinced that people’s conceptual network is basically structured by core metaphors; for example, that abstract concepts like feeling, are metaphorically structured by concrete spatial concepts such as orientation (e.g., happiness is up and sadness is down).
Conceptual metaphor Time as Space
Given by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (in Metaphors We live by), conceptual metaphor theory represents a well-developed theory from the research method of cognitive linguistics This theory is an approach to conceptual organization and structure which has been influential in cognitive science That the concept generating is motivated by conceptual metaphors forms the central idea of conceptual metaphor theory Conceptual metaphors map inferential structure between two distinct conceptual domain (time and space, for instance) This kind of metaphor allows people to structure or perceive one more abstract domain (time) in terms of a more concrete domain (space) (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, Lakoff 2000) This certain relationship can be expressed as ‘Time is Space’ that time as the motion of objects, and time as a
With respect to this metaphor, scholars have come to a general conclusion that there is a difference between moving-time and moving-ego metaphors (Clark, 1973; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Genter, 2001; Evans, 2003) In the first one, it is not the observer, but the temporal events that move from future to past while with moving-ego, the observer stands in the time-line and moves to the fixed future time events
Beside some veteran linguists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Vyvyan Evans, Günter Radden has obtained significant achievements in cognition field The study ‘The Metaphor TIME AS SPACE across Languages’ by Gunter is carried out across many languages such as English, French, Chinese, Italian and German, in which time is investigated with six dimensions: dimensionality of time, orientation of the time-line, shape of time-line, position of times relative to the observer, sequences of time units and motion of time It is noticeable here that the motion of time is conceptualized in the moving-time and moving-ego models according to whether time or observer moves in time-line
However, that the motion model of certain verbs and prepositions used in metaphor time as space is not discussed in detail
Lera Boroditsky with the article Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors from the Journal Cognition also reaches an agreement on the above ideas The linguist again proves that the space and time domains have the same conceptual structure in language through three experiments However, the author claims that thinking about time does not always need spatial schemas when frequent mappings between space and time have been kept in the domain of time The article mentions many spatial expressions such as in front of, ahead, behind, up, down, before, forward
However, prepositions before and behind have not been put on focus yet
In general, metaphors are adopted for describing abstract ideas difficult to perceive through our senses - such as time, love, life, ideas, theories, morality, mind, anger, fear, politics, society, communication, God and religion A target domain of a metaphor is characterized by a number of source domains, as has been widely accepted by researchers working on metaphor like Lakoff &
Johnson (1980) and Kửvecses (1991) Kửvecses (2000, 82) asserts that ‘a source domain contributes not randomly selected but predetermined conceptual materials agreed upon by a community of speakers to the range of target domains to which it applies.’ Metaphor is not merely a decorative device of language, not related to the human thought and culture Rather, metaphor is a central signal that represents the peculiarity of language and culture Time is one of the most abstract but essential concept in our human life, and each culture has developed different sets of metaphor for the reference of time
Following the seminal work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), cognitive semanticists claim it is well established in principle that space is used symbolically in the thought processes and languages of most, if not all, people, and that orientational metaphors are widespread in languages, generating related phrases and expressions Grounded in our experiences of interaction with the world, we understand, for example, that growth is often linked to health and strength
From the studies reviewed, there is a call for further investigations on the certain spatial expressions such as before, behind and their roles in time conceptualization.
METHODOLOGY
Research method
Firstly, the researcher analyzes the meaning network of each spatial preposition (before, behind); Secondly, the researcher analyzes how these particles are used to express time; depends on the spatial schemas to find out the temporal schemas (Ego-moving and Time-moving) Finally, the researcher analyzes two temporal schemas (Ego-moving and Time-moving)
Lakoff and Johnson (1980:3) state that: "…metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature."
The theoretical assumptions on which the present paper is based are derived from the conceptual theory of metaphor initially developed by Lakoff and Johnson In its broadest sense, the cognitive approach claims that metaphors are pervasive in conventional language and thought
Metaphor is a device with the capacity to structure our conceptual system, providing, at the same time, a particular understanding of the world and a way to make sense of our experience From this point, metaphor is defined by Lakoff and Nunez (2000:5) as "the mechanism by which the abstract is comprehended in terms of the concrete."
Lakoff and Johnson believe that the metaphors people use provide information on how they understand things They note that a person's communication is a key source to indicating how that person thinks Not only do metaphors provide a window for people to see another's person conceptual system, metaphors also shape people's conceptual systems Metaphors also
"govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around the world, and how we relate to other people "
Thus, metaphors play a key role in people's communication and conceptualization A case illustrating what it means for a concept to be metaphorical and for such a concept to structure an everyday activity, is the conceptual metaphor TIME AS SPACE English has many everyday expressions that are grounded on conceptualizing the domain of time in terms of the domain of space, such as “Look how far we have come We cannot turn back now”
Thus, metaphor involves understanding one domain of experience, time, in terms of a very different domain of experience, space "Technically, the metaphor can be understood as a mapping from a source domain (in this case, space) to a target domain (in this case, time)".
How to determine distinct senses
There are many different approaches of how best to model a meaning network, which is to some extent subjective Tyler and Evans (1999) suggested two criteria for determining whether a particular instance of a spatial particle counts as a distinct sense First, to be counted as distinct, a sense must contain additional meaning not apparent in any other senses associated with a particular form, which means that a distinct sense must involve non-spatial meaning or a different configuration between the TR and LM than found in the proto-scene
Second, there must be instances of the sense that are context independent, that is, in which the distinct sense could not be inferred from another sense and the context in which it occurs In order to see how this would work let’s consider the following sentences:
(1) We were walking behind you
(2) The road is behind the house
In the first sentence behind designates a spatial relation in which the TR, coded by we, is located at the back of the LM (you) In the second sentence, behind also designates a spatial relationship in which the TR, the road, is located at the back of the LM (the house) Thus, neither of the uses of behind in these two sentences adds additional meaning with respect to each other It can be seen that the same basic TR–LM configuration holds in both and no additional non- spatial meaning is prompted for by one and not the other These two examples of behind have failed one of the two assessments and cannot be treated as two distinct senses
Besides, there are also examples that do appear to constitute a distinct sense:
(3) The president placed environmental welfare behind all other items in his legislative programme
In this sentence a non-spatial relation designated by behind, in which the
TR, environmental welfare is less important than other items/problems on the legislative agenda Thus, the meaning of behind appears to be that a lack of priority and importance represents an additional meaning not apparent in examples such as those in (1) and (2) The fact that the usage in (3) brings additional meaning meets the first assessment criterion for whether this instance counts as a distinct sense
In terms of the second, we must establish whether the lack of priority meaning can be derived from context If it can be, then this instance would fail the second assessment criterion and so could not be a distinct sense Assuming that behind involves a sense that involves a unique configuration between a TR and LM and that this configuration involves some sense of the TR being more important than the LM, we see no way that the lack of importance meaning component associated with behind in (3) can be derived from context The TR, environmental welfare, is not important as the LM, other items As all other items in legislative programme are typically more important /privileged than environmental welfare, and the president usually pays more attention to other issues than environment welfare
Such an inference is not possible in the example in (1) and (2) as the spatial relation holding between the TR and the LM is one which would normally be coded by front/back (i.e., we are walking at the back of you) rather than by less important In short, unless we already know that behind has a lack of priority meaning associated with it, there is no ready contextual means of deriving this meaning in sentences such as (3) and From this, we conclude that the lack of priority meaning associated with behind in (3) constitutes a distinct sense
The two assessment criteria may be shown to exclude senses that are legitimately instantiated in the language user’s mental lexicon and hence would have to be adjusted This methodology predicts many of the findings which have already come to light, and hence represents a reasonable approximation for assessing where the line should be drawn between what counts as a distinct sense conventionalized in semantic memory and a contextual inference, produced on-line for the purpose of local understanding The methodology provides a rigorous and relatively consistent way of making judgements as to whether a sense is distinct or not, and provides methodology which can be used in an inter-subjective way.
ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
Analysis
Our conceptualization of front versus back references the human body in which the primary organs of the perception are located in the front of the head, the researcher begins this chapter by demonstrating that spatial particles typically have numerous meanings associated with them It is claimed that a subset of interpretations represents those meanings which must be stored in memory, and hence are permanently available, which are termed senses
3.1.1 Meaning network and image schema of ‘before’
The spatial particle before relates historically to Old English beforen/bifuran, glossed as ‘be front’ or ‘ahead’ Fore was a separate preposition in Old English and meant ‘located at the front of’ Before involves an in tandem configuration developing a ‘located at the front of’ meaning In English, we find evidence for two competing senses, the Location Sense (involving a TR and an oriented LM) and the In Advance Of Sense involving an in tandem configuration) Consider the following examples:
(Eg 1) A reached the finish line before B
Fig 1: Image schema of before in Eg 1
(Eg 2) Hannah arrived home before George
Fig 2: Image schema of before in Eg 2
A recurring consequence of two animate, oriented entities being in an in tandem alignment and in motion is that the one in the advance position will encounter other entities first An unavoidable consequence of the two entities being so aligned is that they will encounter other entities sequentially For instance, in a race, with three runners, A, B and C, runner A finishes first, runner
B second and runner C third In such a case, by virtue of A being located in front of runners B and C, A is sequenced prior to both B and C, and arrives at (or encounters) the finish line prior to, or in advance of, B and C The tight correlation between location and sequence in scenes involving an in tandem alignment has resulted in the strong implicature of sequentiality becoming associated with before
Similarly, a recurring consequence of two static entities being in an in tandem alignment is that a person approaching the static entities would encounter them sequentially So, if three people, Tony, George, Hannah, are standing in line, one behind the other, and a fourth person, Katherine, approaches from the front of the line, Katherine will encounter the three in sequential order home
Moreover, when we are in motion, we encounter static entities which are aligned but not necessarily inherently oriented However, as we approach these objects, we often perceive the side nearest to us as most salient and thus assign the near side a functional orientation of front Thus, we experience two aligned but unoriented objects, such as lamp posts, as being in an in tandem alignment as we encounter them It is inevitable that we encounter such aligned objects in sequence Under such a construal, before is licensed We hypothesize that with use the implicature of sequence associated with before has gained in salience such that before can be used to denote any set of ordered entities, as in the following:
(Eg 3) B is before C in the alphabet
Fig 3: Image schema of before in Eg 3
(Eg 4) Thursday is always before Friday
Figure 4: Image schema of before in Eg 4
It is worth highlighting the fact that sequences are temporally framed relations, either because the event itself correlates with the passage of time, or because the processing required to relate two discrete units in a sequence, as in two letters in the alphabet, correlates with the passage of time Therefore, a
A sequence is necessarily a temporal concept, and as such a Sequence Sense is thereby a Temporal Sense Thus, before is largely associated with temporality while its origins are spatial in nature
Some sentences employing before do not necessarily involve an in tandem alignment and do not have a sequential interpretation:
(Eg 5) John was summoned before the principal
Figure 5: Image schema of before in Eg 5
In these spatial scenes the vantage point of the principle is privileged, before denotes a Location Sense, virtually indistinguishable from in front of It is important to emphasize that this sense is restricted and in many contexts appears to have been superseded by in front of Before is not acceptable as some native speakers even find the use of before to relate a trajector to non-human landmark semantically anomalous or archaic as in this example: Look, Chris is standing before his new truck in this picture This suggests that before has primarily retained its historical ‘located at the front of’ meaning in specific contexts, as evidenced in the example This ‘location’ use appears to have been retained, at least partially
(Eg 6) Look, Chris is standing before his new truck in this picture
Fig 6: Image schema of before in Eg 6
Before has a Priority Sense associated with it In this sense before denotes a non-spatial relation between two entities in which the notion of being more privileged or more important in some way is signalled Consider some examples:
(Eg 7) This airline makes a virtue out of placing safety before all else
Fig 7: Image schema of before in Eg 7
In this example safety is afforded a higher priority than all else This relation is designated by before Clearly, this sense is distinct from the previous meaning associated with before as it involves an additional, non-spatial relation
As we observed above, a consequence of being physically located in an in front of location during an in tandem alignment is that this results in being more privileged or receiving greater priority After all, being first in line or coming safety truck
Priority first in a foot race correlate with advantages or privileges Given that the original meaning associated with before involves just such an in tandem alignment, it is natural that before should have also developed a Priority Sense
Behind originally meant ‘located at the back’ When we say ‘the woman stood behind the man’, this means the man is understood to be located in front of the woman, the woman is located with respect to the man’s back However, the orientation of the woman is not crucial as she can be looking at the man’s back or turning her back towards the man Consider the following diagram:
(Eg 8) The woman stood behind the man
Fig 8: Image schema of behind in Eg 8
The person A represents the woman, the other one represents the man
The arrow indicates the orientation of the man, the woman is situated at the back of the man, and then is positioned behind the man We can see that ‘the woman’ does not have clear front/back orientation The functional element denoted by behind relates to lack of perceptual access and lack of surety about the location of the woman The woman can be looking at the back of the man or having her back facing the man
Land marks could be non-animate entities if we normally construe them as having front/back orientation As in the example ‘the road is behind the house’, houses normally have a designated main access which is construed as the front The trajector, the road, is located nearest the side opposite to the front - the back of the house The landmark – houses does not need to have fixed orientation as it has functional orientation
The Lack of Priority Sense
Behind also has a sense that relates to a lack of priority, hence a concomitant lack of importance or being privileged Consider an example:
(Eg 9) The president placed environmental welfare behind all other items in his legislative programme
Fig 9: Image schema of behind in Eg 9
Discussion
Two spatial particles behind and before have been analyzed The analysis supports the perspective of the principled polysemy approach In particular, the conclusions support the general view adduced that non-spatial meaning is often derived from spatial experience, which is meaningful due to the way in which we interact with the world around us For instance, face-to-face interaction with
Time Space other humans has given rise to the tendency to project a mirror-image alignment in closed scenes involving non-oriented entities Additionally, human interaction with inanimate objects often results in construals of orientation based on function, such as assigning a house a front/back orientation based on typical access or aligned lamp-posts a front/back orientation based on the side which is visible to a human as he or she approaches the lamp-posts
People usually view time move from the past to the present to the future as in expressions time goes by, time passes, etc However, the question is: “is it only time that moves?” Sometimes, it is not time as a thing, or moment that moves, but the world or events in time, as in ‘her birthday is approaching’, ‘Tet is coming’ Then, we also have to take the world or people move in time into consideration Thus, not only time but also people move in time with different speed In this paper, only common models of motion with fixed background is focused There are two main models of conceptualizing time as motion including the time - moving model and the ego - moving model
In the time - moving model, time is conceived of as moving Lakoff
(1993) describes the metaphor based on this model as ‘time passing is motion of an object’ Time may move non-deictically, for example, irrespective of a human observer as in It’s getting close to sundown, or deictically, relative to a stationary human observer as a reference point In the ego - moving model, the observer is conceived of as moving and time as being stationary Lakoff (1993) describes the metaphor based on this model as time passing is motion over a landscape
The time-moving model appears to be in accordance with our folk view of time as flowing People are surprised when they realize that time does not flow from the past to the future, but from the future to the past In this respect, the time - moving model is diametrically opposed to our entrenched belief in the direction of the flow of time Since this model of time is so widespread cross- linguistically, it must, in spite of its reversal of the expected flow of time, have certain cognitive advantages These are: The time - moving model allows us to relate moving time to a fixed ground: the stationary world The key figure in the stationary, unchanging world is the human observer, and time and events in time pass by him as in coming week and past week This model is motivated by our self-centered view of the world, in which each human being sees himself at the very center of the world The time - moving model allows us to conceptualize our experience of time as changing: the future changes into the present and the present changes into the past The moving-time model allows us to bestow an independent existence upon time: units of time become measurable relative to each other irrespective of their deictic positioning, as in the following week ‘the later week’ and the preceding week ‘the earlier week’ The source of the time - moving model is the physical world There is no force that changes the straight motion of time, so time keeps forever moving The observer’s only contribution in this scenario is that of occupying a position on the time-line and watching the passing of time from his vantage point The time - moving model thus lends itself to the notion of time and events as evolving and occurring
In this, the observer comes from the past and moves via the present into the future, while time as the reference ground remains stationary The moving- ego model is reflected in expression such as we have left the 237 worst behind us
This model of static time is inconsistent with our folk view of moving time, but it also has aspects of cognitive motivation: The ego - moving model is consistent with our view of the flow of time: the observer as part of the world moves in the
“right” direction, from the past into the future The ego - moving model allows us to conceptualize time in terms of our image-schematic, sensorimotor experience of locomotion The ego - moving model allows us to relate notions of moving model is based on people’s locomotion When people decide to move to some place, they typically do so intentionally and with the purpose of doing something at the destination Equally, locomotion in time typically involves intentionality
This chapter has analysed spatial schemas of two prepositions before, behind with ego-moving and object-moving systems From that, the correlation mappings between spatial and temporal expressions are indicated Besides, the chapter provides two temporal models for before and behind which correspond with spatial models, ego – moving and time – moving The next part will give a short summary of research analysis and discussion with limitations as well as suggestions for further studies
As the final part of the research paper, this chapter first summarizes the major findings of the research with reference to the research questions and in light of literature It then discusses some implication and limitations of this study may bring Lastly, some suggestions for further research will be provided.
Summary
With the aims of investigating space – time conceptual metaphor in English, the researcher conducted a study into two spatial particles before, behind to explain how these two spatial prepositions conceptualize time
Based on theoretical framework about cognitive lingustics in general and conceptual metaphor Time as Space in particular, the conceptualization of two particles before, behind are thoroughly explored with image schemas
After analyzing meaning network and image schemas of particles before, behind, the researcher develops two moving schemas of these two spatial prepositions known as the Ego-moving and Object-moving models Besides, space and time corresponds to each other to some extent, which then allow spatial schemas to be related to temporal schemas when people conceptualize time These schemas have effect on the temporal schemas, in other words, the spatial schemas help to shape the way time is conceptualized with two models: Ego-moving and Time-moving Depending on differently metaphorical models, people conceptualize time and use appropriate prepositions and sentence structures.
Implication
English spatial prepositions are considered as one of the most difficult aspects of the language to master The research has brought about significant implications on metaphor theory for English learners and teachers First of all, this piece of research contributed to raise learners’ awareness of metaphor
‘Time as space’ In conceptualizing time as space, we may take advantage of the conceptual richness inherent in the spatial domain as a whole and, in mapping its structural elements onto time, impart meanings onto temporal notions For example, we may think of time as moving backward or forward
It is to be expected that those aspects of space which best conform to our everyday experience in the spatial world are preferentially made use of and typically found across languages But, in lexicalizing notions of time, different languages may also exploit the cognitive topology of space in different ways This paper is concerned with the ways English makes use of the pool of spatial meanings in conceptualizing and expressing notions of time
Besides, it is hopeful that this paper will provide a more clearly framework to access English spatial prepositions such as before, behind for second language learners and teachers It is hypothesized that spatial particles have great influence on people’s thinking or how people conceptualize time, but this hypothesis is not completely explored Therefore, learners and teachers of English can expectedly make use of this research to sort out difficulty in acquiring English from cognitive perspective.
Limitations and suggestions for further studies
Although this study has analyzed how spatial schemas affect time reasoning with two spatial prepositions, some unavoidable shortcomings are found in this paper Firstly, a small number of prepositions (only two: behind, before) are investigated The conclusions from the discussion are applied on those, not a wide range of language unit Therefore, further studies with larger scope should be encouraged
Besides, the various sources of data are not the strong points of this paper as the data is chosen from many English books and stories It would be better if the data is collected from more authentic sources
Another limitation for the study is that it shed the light on conceptual metaphor in English without much comparing to other languages Thus, it would be useful if more comparative researches are carried out between English and others (including Vietnamese) in the future
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