The metaphors of time in 3D in Chinese, Spanish and English

Abstract

For the spatial notion, there are three dimensions: front-back, up-down, left-right. And the temporal concept is composed of the past, the present and the future. In the worlds’ languages, it is very common for us to use spatial terms in order to express temporal concepts. In this study, we will study the linguistic manifestations of the metaphor THE TIME AS SPACE by Lakoff (1980) in Chinese, Spanish and English. We will make comparisons between spatio-temporal expressions in these three languages to find the common and the different between them.