Editor’s Note:
In this article, Time, Motion and Space are discussed as metaphorical concepts. You may have noticed the different capitalisation of those words — it’s intentional! “Time” and “time” are different. In academic writing we’d capitalise the entire word (ie. TIME), but to keep with the blog’s casual format and style, we’ve done it this way instead.
– Alicia Lau

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How do we think about Time? To answer this question, we may look at how we talk about Time. Why do we say things like ‘2020 is going so quickly’? With what exactly can we not ‘keep up’?

It turns out that we tend to talk about Time in metaphorical terms rather than literal terms, even for those who profess to be non-creatives. Whether you have noticed it or not, metaphors are quite central to our basic understanding and perception of the world around us.

What are conceptual metaphors (also known as cognitive metaphors)?

These refer to the mapping of one conceptual domain in terms of another. For example, quantity (conceptual domain) as directionality (conceptual domain), so we might say something like

‘2020 is really bringing my anxiety up to a whole new level.’

In this example, the quantity (I recognise that anxiety is arguably intangible) of anxiety has gone up (direction). Perhaps this taps in to our general understanding of how objects pile up thanks to the ancient wizardry of gravity when you stack more and more of them together. Perhaps it’s easier to describe the incorporeal (like anxiety, which you cannot directly see, and you cannot directly feel if you are not the subject) using metaphors to which we can relate.

Time is Motion

It’s quite impossible not to talk about Time in terms of motion, and English is one of the languages in which we witness this phenomenon. Let’s consider the following verbs: ‘approach’, ‘come’, and ‘go’. In literal terms, we can think of these verbs being used to describe the movement of physical entities, such as ‘The school bus is approaching Regina’ and ‘Is he coming/going shopping with us?’

How do we describe Time though? Let’s consider the following sentences, contextually relevant at the time of writing (November 2020) as Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You begins to gather interest on Google searches:

1. Christmas is approaching!
2. We’re coming up to Christmas!
3. It will soon be Christmas!

Sentences (1) and (2) evidently mirror the earlier discussed difficulty of describing Time without making reference to Motion verbs. Christmas is coming, Christmas is about to arrive… Honestly, it’s difficult… Perhaps sentence (3) appears to be the least metaphorical by using the modal verb ‘will’ and the temporal adverb ‘soon’. Okay, so how is it special? ‘Will’ is used as an epistemological modal verb (read: it tells you what the speaker thinks or believes they know).

This is different from sentences (1) and (2) which use dynamic verbs to describe Time as the sentences put forward an observation rather than a belief that it is about to be Christmas. Too confusing? Here are the rewritten sentences for your kind perusal:

A. I am observing that Christmas is approaching.
B. I am observing that we are coming up to Christmas.
C. I am just telling you that I believe that it will soon be Christmas.

Sometimes it’s worth considering what’s moving. Sentence (1) is what we would describe as time-moving, whilst sentence (2) is ego-moving. By ego we mean the speaker or writer, so in ‘Christmas is approaching!’, the speaker is observing that the deluge of All I Want for Christmas Is You (time-moving) is coming towards them (ego-stationary) like a freight train. Meanwhile in ‘We’re coming up to Christmas!’, the speaker is creeping up (ego-moving) to an unsuspecting Santa Claus (time-stationary) who honestly just wants a break…

So we have two kinds of ego-centricity categories:

1. Time-moving (ego-stationary)
2. Ego-moving (time-stationary)

This is where I present some nuggets of information (perhaps a Chinese ingot would be more culturally appropriate) by drawing a comparison to Mandarin Chinese:

Like English, Mandarin Chinese contains a wide variety of Motion metaphors (adapted from Lai & Boroditsky, 2013)

[How to read the translations]

1. Original text in Chinese (spaces between characters added to facilitate transposition)
2. Transposition — translating each lexical unit by meaning or grammatical property
3. Translated text in English

Time-moving	Ego-moving
期末考 快 到 了 Final-exam fast arrive PRT ‘The final exams are fast approaching’	快 到 期末考 了 (Pro-drop)* fast arrive final-exam PRT** ‘[We are] fast approaching the final exams’
二十一 世纪 已经 到来 Twenty-one century already arrive-come ‘The 21st century has come’	我们 已经 进入 二十一 世纪 We already enter twenty-one century ‘We have entered the 21st century’

* The pronoun ‘we’ has been dropped
** PRT = particle (it’s like a small function word used to express additional meaning)

These Motion metaphors perhaps demonstrate that the earlier established English conceptual metaphor ‘Time is Motion’ also applies in Mandarin Chinese. The Chinese verbs 到 (‘to arrive’), 来 (‘to come’), 进入 (‘to enter’) denote physical movement and are commonly used to describe an ego-time relationship rather than fancy novel metaphorical expressions as used in literary work. The two pairs of examples above are, in fact, semantically equivalent which suggests that English and Mandarin Chinese linguistically represent Time similarly through Motion metaphors despite the fact that both languages possess very different grammatical and orthographic (how it is written/visually represented) systems. I’ve included a little write-up at the end of this article if you’d like to find out more!

Time is Space

Talking about Time inevitably involves discussion about chronology — how events are ordered, which is quite a Herculean task for future historians bold enough to document the timeline of events in 2020, considering the myriad of unfortunate events that have transpired.

English uses a variety of spatiotemporal (space and time) metaphors including spatial adverbs and prepositions to order events:

Spatial metaphor	Word class	Temporal reference
Ahead	Adverb	Future
Behind	Preposition	Past
Forward	Adverb	Future
Back/backwards	Adverb	Past
After	Preposition	Future
Before	Preposition	Past

Just like our earlier discussion about Motion metaphors, it is quite a challenge to sequence events without falling back on spatial expressions. Interestingly, we note that English tends to represent Time on a one-dimensional plane, unidirectionally on a horizontal axis. What’s in front tends to represent the future, and what’s behind tends to represent the past — just like the trajectory of a moving object. We can think of Time in English as Horizontal Space.

/insert: Chinese ingot of knowledge and wisdom

Unlike English, Chinese uses both axes frequently to describe Time (i.e. up-down and front-back). In other words, Time is both Horizontal Space and Vertical Space! Consider the examples adapted from Cheng, 2014:

Horizontal Space	Vertical Space
以前 / 以后 to-front / to-back ‘before’ / ‘after’	上个月 / 下个月 up-DET*-month / down-DET-month ‘last month’ / ‘next month’
前途 / 前景 front-path / front-view ‘future’ / ‘outlook’	上午 / 下午 up-midday / down-midday ‘morning/A.M.’ / ‘afternoon/P.M.’
后来 / 后果 back-come / back-fruit ‘afterwards’ / ‘consequence’	上半年 / 下半年 up-half-year / down-half-year “first half of the year” / “second half of the year”
前天 / 后天 front-day / back-day ‘the day before yesterday’ / ‘the day after tomorrow’	高龄 / 低龄 high-age / low-age ‘elderly’ / ‘youth’

* DET = Determiner; in this case a general classifier that denotes the number of things/people

It is quite clear that Chinese represents Time on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Does this mean that Mandarin Chinese speakers tend to think about Time differently? Research done by Lai & Boroditsky (2013) in California and Taiwan found that sociolinguistic factors are important in the production of conceptual metaphors in natural speech — if a speaker has access to multiple representations of Time, the type of conceptual metaphor used in the experiment tends to influence the type of conceptual metaphor the speakers choose to respond in.

I suppose it’s difficult to deny that metaphors permeate everyday speech and have been transferred from their original domain to facilitate or even enable discussions of abstract concepts such as Time. Since Time is intangible and cannot be directly perceived through one’s physical senses, it seems fitting that a more perceptible domain be used to represent Time such as Space and Motion, which can be observed through sight.

Try paying attention to your speech (and others) next time — what other abstract concepts do people express in, somewhat conventionally, literal terms?

Extra nerding for the intellectually curious

• An example of a grammatical difference between English and Chinese is that the latter does not indicate tense through inflectional morphology. Whilst English has the inflectional morpheme ‘-ed’ to denote past tense (e.g. ‘listen’ + ‘-ed’), Chinese uses temporal particles (additional words) to indicate the past tense (e.g. 听了 which transposes into ‘to listen’ + PRT).
• English and Chinese also differ in their orthographic system. English uses a Latin-based alphabetic system with individual letters coming together to form words (e.g. the graphemes <r> + <e> + <d> combine to form the word ‘red’) whilst Chinese uses a logographic system with characters somewhat representing meaning on their own. These characters can be combined to form ‘bigger words’ with new meanings, such as 粉 (powder) + 红 (red) which gives you 粉红 (pink).

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Note from author:

This article is adapted from an original assignment essay I submitted for the 5SSEL008 Lexis module taught by Dr. Martin Edwardes in my second year, titled ‘Primary Conceptual Metaphors about TIME: A Cross-linguistic Study between English and Mandarin Chinese’.