A Cognitive Corpus-based Study of Spatial and Temporal Metaphors in Chinese

Conceptual metaphors are believed to be ubiquitous in human language and thought which may vary with different socio-cultural contexts. This corpus-based study attempts to investigate the metaphorical extensions of space and time in Chinese, taking three pairs of spatial terms shang(up)/xia(down), qian(front)/hou(back), zuo(left)/you(right) and one temporal term shijian(time) as searching words for space and time respectively. The results showed that in spatial metaphors, metaphorical extensions mainly include TIME, STATE, QUANTITY, SCOPE and SOCIAL STATUS which sometimes overlap among these three spatial dimensions, but with one sense being more prominent in one dimension or with some of the senses missing in certain dimensions. In temporal metaphors, three main metaphorical extensions are found, i.e., A MOVING ENTITY, VALUABLES and ANIMATE OR INANIMATE CREATURE. The findings indicate that conceptual metaphor, although rooted into embodied experience, needs to be examined in combination with specific socio-cultural backgrounds.

“Through Whom He Made the Ages”

The default translation of the phrase δι’ οὗ καὶ ἐποίησεν τοὺς αἰῶνας in Heb 1:2c is spatial: “through whom he made the worlds/universe.” The typical explanation for why this temporal term should have a spatial meaning is that αἰών can have the sense of “the ages and everything in them,” so that it is roughly equivalent to the universe of space and time. In contrast, this paper demonstrates on the bases of lexical-historical, broad contextual, and immediate contextual evidence that a temporal translation (“ages” as in history) is preferable and that this temporal sense is more specifically salvation-historical in meaning.

Empire, Place, and the Victorians

The essay surveys the different meanings of ‘place’ in relation to the local and the global. Regarding England and empire, ‘place’ often evokes nostalgia for ‘home, sweet home’, but can just as easily refer to entire continents. ‘Place’ can also be a temporal term; Darwin and other scientists introduced the concept of geological, evolutionary time, for example. And it can involve an individual’s or group’s location on a hierarchy of gender, race, and social class: the Victorian English liked to think they belonged to the ‘imperial race’, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’.

Syntactic and semantic factors in the acquisition of before and after

ABSTRACTSixty kindergartners and sixty first graders were given three tasks to test their comprehension of the terms before and after. The results show that when temporal terms are acquired, they are first used as prepositions and then as subordinating conjunctions. When the child does not know the meaning of a temporal term, he frequently interprets it as meaning the next-event-in-time. There are two strategies (main-clause-first and order-of-mention) that the child may adopt when interpreting temporal terms used as subordinating conjunctions. The use of these strategies appears to be independent of the child's knowledge of the meanings of the terms. Contrary to previous research, it was found that before does not seem to be learned before after nor does there appear to be any stage where after is treated to mean before.