Sequential Time Construal is Primary in Temporal Uses of Mandarin Chinese qian ‘front’ and hou ‘back’

Abstract

We address two unresolved puzzles regarding the relationship between temporal and spatial conceptualizations in Mandarin Chinese. First, apparently conflicting data have led to disagreement over whether temporal usages of the terms qian ‘front’ and hou ‘back’ are based on a schema of Ego facing towards past or towards future. Second, which of the sagittal, vertical and lateral orientational axes is more fundamental in Mandarin spatio-temporal language and cognition has been much debated. We review these controversies, propose new analyses and report four experiments. Our findings are consistent with the primacy in Mandarin Chinese of the invariant Sequential Time construal of the terms qian ‘front’ (EARLIER) and hou ‘back’ (LATER) over their contextually governed Deictic Time reference to pastness and futurity. We find also that the preferred lexicalization of temporal relations between events by Mandarin speakers involves the sagittal axis terms qian and hou, but this preference does not hold for non-linguistic representations of event sequences. Finally, our data suggest that the temporal meanings of qian and hou (‘earlier’ and ‘later’) are more salient for Mandarin speakers than their spatial meanings (‘front’ and ‘back’) in motion event conceptualizations.

Mental Representations of Time in English Monolinguals, Mandarin Monolinguals, and Mandarin–English Bilinguals

“…However, the orientation is directed at an opposite pattern for sequential time, because it flows from front to back ( Tenbrink, 2011 ; Bender and Beller, 2014 ), with earlier event on the front and later event on the back side (e.g., Tuesday comes before Wednesday, Friday comes after Thursday). The predominant recruitment of front/earlier and back/later for sequential time along the sagittal axis can be found in both corpus studies on English and Mandarin ( Xiao, 2012 ; Walker et al, 2017 ) and behavior experiments ( Walker et al, 2014 , 2017 ; Yang et al, 2020 ). These observations may explain why RTs were shorter in FE than in BE condition along the sagittal axis in the present study.…”