Ego-moving metaphor

In ASL, temporal signs utilize the future is ahead metaphor which is consistent with both the ego-moving metaphor in which the observer moves toward the future and the time-moving metaphor in which time is conceived of as a type of river that flows from the future toward the... 

Why Are Time-Moving Metaphors More Difficult Than Ego-Moving Metaphors ... 

The most obvious advantage of the ego-moving framework is that it requires fewer distinct conceptual points. Statements in the ego-moving metaphor express the temporal relationship between an event and an observer (e.g., We are approaching the holidays ) and therefore can be represented as two points on a time-line ... 

The fact that the time-moving metaphor is typically a three-term relation whereas the ego-moving metaphor is typically a two-term relation probably contributes to the greater processing difficulty of time-moving metaphors. 

Another possibility that should be investigated is whether the ego-moving metaphor simply occurs more frequently in discourse than the time-moving metaphor. But even if it does, it would not be clear whether such a frequency differential was cause or effect of the greater processing ease. 

We conducted a second study to guard against the possibility that local lexical associations led to the Consistency effect. In this experiment we took advantage of a small set of spatio-temporal terms that can be used in both the ego-moving and time-moving metaphors, but which convey the opposite temporal order in the two systems. This set includes before, ahead and behind. This sequence reversal is exemplified in the following two sentences. 

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