“前、后”的时间指向问题新探

A Further Study on the Interpretation of the Chinese Temporal Expressions Qian and Hou

学界常用"时间在动"和"人在动"这两个隐喻模式分析"前、后"表"过去"和"将来"的用法,而至于"前、后"是如何跟"过去"和"将来"相关联等问题,则鲜有讨论,以致相关分析未能触及本质问题。本文通过对"前、后"由空间域到时间域投射情况的考察发现:"前"表过去、"后"表将来为无标记用法;"前"表将来、"后"表过去是有标记用法。在此基础上,本文区分时间词语和时间表达方式的不同情况,对"前、后"时间词语表过去或表将来的用法做统一的分析和解释。研究表明,"前、后"时间指向的问题关涉三个方面的因素:构式类型、表达视角和参照时间。

This paper investigates the temporal interpretation of qian ＇ front＇ and hou ＇ back＇ in Chinese. In Chinese the two lexical items qian and hou can be used to refer to not only the past, but also the future. These usages have been receutly surveyed and analyzed by Cai （2012） through the metaphorical cognition models put forward by Clark （1973）. According to these models, time is treated as either a moving object or one through which we are moving. Although these models can be applied to the analysis of the meaning of sentences such as ＂We are running to a bright future＂ and ＂The new century has come to us＂, they seem to fail to account for the usage ofqian or hou in Chinese. Specifically, they could not explain why both qian and hou could be used to refer to either the past or the future. Time is a form of existence of all the things in the universe and the universe itself from a philosophical point of view. Human beings initially understand and indicate time through their observations of celestial bodies （ such as the movement of the Sun, the Moon, etc.）, the growth and death of the animated, and the position changes of the non-animated. Originally, time has no boundaries, but in people＇s psychological world, time is generally divided into the past, the present and the future. This division is actually a reflection of human＇s psychological boundary. Both the past and the future are relative to the present,and the present usually refers to the time of speaking （ or time period when the event takes place）. That is to say, the present has a relative flexibility, and it always varies from speaker to speaker as well as from case to case. In fact, the two different Chinese lexical items qian and hou can be used to indicate either the past or the future as a result of a cognitive projection from their spatial domain to their time domain. Some of their spatial characteristics have a certain impact on their temporal ones. This paper shows that it is unmarked for qian to refer to the past and for hou to refer to the future whereas it is marked for qian to refer to the future and for hou to refer to the past. The distinction between the unmarked and marked usages of these two lexical items is very important in the study of the temporal indication of qian and hou, which was ignored by previous studies on the use of these two lexical items. This paper argues that the temporal interpretation of qian and hou is determined by many interconnected factors, such as structure types, point of view and reference time. In the last part of the paper, we make an analysis and interpretation of both the words with qian as an element such as ＂qianjin （前景）, qiantu （前途）, qiancheng （前程）, qiantou （ 前头）and qianmian （前面）＂ and the phrases ＂Prep. ＋qian ＋V（P）, Prep. ＋ hou＋V（P） ＂, which is very different from the previous studies.