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Distributions of Temporal Metaphors in Japanese



Author(s)

Kohei Suzuki

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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2015.02.003

Mie University, Mie, Japan

In the conceptual metaphor theory, it has been common to assume at least two metaphors where concepts of Time are structured through concepts of Space; Time-moving metaphor and Ego-moving metaphor. Several researchers carried out quantitative studies and revealed that languages have preferences on these Temporal metaphors: Ego-moving metaphor is more preferable in English and Chinese. This paper conducted a corpus-based research on the distributions of dual Temporal metaphors. This study observed Time-moving metaphor is more frequent in Japanese, contrary to the prediction from English and Chinese. This study clearly shows that most motion verbs have skewed distributions between Time-moving meaning and Ego-moving meaning and few verbs have “dual” usage at all in Japanese. In addition, this study’s data indicate Time-moving metaphor and Ego-moving metaphor are not mere variants of each other, but each metaphor has peculiar and complicated constraints on its usage.

dual Temporal metaphors, Time-moving metaphor, Ego-moving metaphor, corpus, frequency