Comparison of Temporal Conception between Chinese and English

Abstract

Chinese and English are of variant language systems, which account for some differences in their temporal concepts.In terms of the temporal concepts EARLIER and LATER between Chinese and English, Vyvyan Evans and MelanieGreen came to a conclusion that English tend to view time on a horizontal axis while Chinese on a vertical axis. Thepresent research intends to obtain a more general and objective view of temporal difference across Chinese andEnglish, by referring to definitions and examples in Chinese and English dictionaries and doing a survey amongsenior English majors in Wenzhou University.

Writing direction and language activation affect how Arabic-English bilingual speakers map time onto space

“…In the case of Taiwanese Mandarin speakers, they were just as likely to represent time as moving from left to right as from top to bottom, with a proportion of participants depicting it as moving from right to left. This pattern of results may also be related to the fact that the Chinese temporal words for last (e.g., in last month ) and next (e.g., in next week ) are, respectively, the words shàng (literally meaning up ) and xià (literally meaning down ) ( Scott, 1989 ; Chen, 2014 , 2021 ; Su, 2019 ). Other studies have also shown that Mandarin speakers display a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time, congruent with Chinese vertical spatiotemporal metaphors ( Boroditsky, 2001 , 2018 ; Boroditsky et al, 2010 ).…”