年龄和语言对母语者时间隐喻视角的影响

Influence of Age and Language on Native Speakers’Metaphorical Perspective of Time

除空间刺激外,非空间因素也会影响人们对时间的认知。已有研究表明,年龄因素会影响人们在时空映射上的偏好。老年人更倾向于将“过去”和“未来”分别与“前面”和“后面”相联系,而年轻人的倾向则与之相反。其原因在于二者对待时间的不同态度,前者更重视过去,后者则更关注未来。基于问卷调查考察了年龄和语言对汉语母语者时间隐喻视角的影响,结果发现:年长的退休人员比年轻的学生更倾向于采用时间移动隐喻视角,符合“时间焦点假设”的猜想;不同语言编码的同一隐喻在歧义程度上有强弱之别。

Both spatial stimuli and non-spatial factors can affect people’s temporal cognition.Previous research has indicated that age can moderate the preference with which people map time onto space.Specifically,older people tend to associate“past”and“future”with“front”and“back”respectively,whereas the opposite tendency is found among younger people.This is attributed to their different attitudes towards time as older people focus more on the past while younger people focus more on the future.Using questionnaires,this paper investigated the influence of age and language on Chinese native speakers’metaphorical perspective of time and the results showed that older retirees were more likely than younger students to adopt the time-moving perspective,which is in accordance with“temporal focus hypothesis”;and the same metaphor encoded in different languages has different strengths of ambiguity.