Space-time metaphor

Thus the mere presence of metaphorical language does not by itself tell us whether the space-time metaphor is a psychologically real conceptual mapping. For example, the temporal and spatial meanings could be represented as alternate meaning senses or even as separate homophonic lexical entries. The apparent systematicity would then be illusory, the result of post hoc regularization. 

A striking aspect of this research is that we found system-level consistency effects for space-time metaphors that are highly conventional. This runs contrary to the findings of Gentner and Boronat (1991, in preparation See also Gentner, 1992, in press Gentner Wolff, 2000) who found... 

A final point is the conceptual utility of the space-time metaphor. The two space-time systems exhibit three characteristics that facilitate reasoning, as laid out by Gattis (in preparation). They use ordered space to represent elements (here, events) and their relations (sequential ordering) they use spatial dimensions (here, a single linear dimension, which is placed in correspondence with time s single dimension) and they appear to form non-arbitrary analogs for abstract concepts. Temporal reasoning is non-trivial, as any traveler can attest. Perhaps these metaphors retain their systematicity because they do serious work for us. 

Gentner, D., and Imai, M. (1992). Is the future always ahead Evidence for system-mappings in understanding space-time metaphors. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 510-515). 

Gentner, D., Imai, M., and Boroditsky, L. (in preparation). As time goes by evidence for two systems in processing space-time metaphors. 

P should also minimize distinction.s between conventionally distinct but atomic. primitives (such as space, mass, time, etc.). The vision is to take one more step along the metaphoric road remove jnan from the center of the universe —> remove all privileged frames of reference —> remove all absolutes —> remove all distinction between space and matter—r remove all distinction ( ) Start by eliminating the tacit assumption that whatever physics is self-organizing itself out of the soup of the current crop of physicists is the physics of this universe in short, go from a solipsistic phys-ics to a fundamentally relativistic physics, wherein even physics itself becomes a set (an infinite hierarchical set ) of self-consistent world-views rather than a prescribed set of exactly/uniquely prescribed laws operating independently of all observers. 

Time is an abstract non-spatial construct, but humans often adapt spatial structures to convey temporal information (e.g., spatial metaphors, charts, and graphs see Tversky, this volume). Similarly, signers adapt signing space to express temporal information both at the lexical level and at the discourse level (see also Kita, this volume, for a discussion of how the gesture space of speakers is used to represent temporal information). 

These examples illustrate how the form of certain signs reflects a mapping between spatial structure and temporal structure. The mapping is based on the spatial metaphor in which future time is mapped to space ahead of a reference point, and the past is mapped to space behind this point. The temporal reference point can be represented either by the signer s body or by the non-dominant hand. 

---