Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time

Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time? Lera Boroditsky (lera@stanford.edu) Department of Psychology, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 420 Stanford, CA 94305 USA bounded events, unidirectional change, etc.) appear to be universal across cultures and languages. However, there are many aspects of our concept of time that are not observable in the world. For example, does time move horizontally or vertically? Does it move forward or back, left or right, up or down? Does it move past us, or do we move through it? All of these aspects are left unspecified in our experience with the world. They are however, specified in our language —most often through spatial metaphors. Across languages, people use spatial metaphors to talk about time. Whether they are looking forward to a brighter tomorrow, proposing theories ahead of their time, or falling behind schedule, they rely on terms from the domain of space to talk about time (Clark, 1973; Lehrer, 1990; Traugott, 1978). Those aspects of time that are not constrained by our physical experience with time are free to vary across languages and our conceptions of them may be shaped by the way we choose to talk about them. This article focuses on one such aspect of time and examines whether different ways of talking about time lead to different ways of thinking about it. Abstract Do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Boroditsky, (2001) demonstrated that speakers of English and Mandarin think differently about time. This work has recently been brought into question (January & Kako, 2007; Chen, 2007). Here I present new evidence that again demonstrates a difference between English and Mandarin speakers’ construals of time. Both languages use horizontal and vertical spatial language to talk about time. For example, in English we might say that the best is ahead of us, or we may move a meeting up. In English, vertical metaphors are relatively infrequent and horizontal metaphors predominate. In Mandarin, both horizontal and vertical metaphors are frequent. Importantly, vertical metaphors are much more frequent in Mandarin than they are in English. The new evidence once again suggests that Mandarin speakers don’t just talk about time vertically more frequently than do English speakers, they also think about time vertically more frequently than do English speakers. Keywords: Language and Thought, Space, Time, Metaphor, Mandarin Introduction Time is a topic of central importance in our culture. According to the latest Oxford dictionary, the word “time” is the most frequently used noun in English, with other temporal words like “year” and “day” also placing in the top 10. How does our understanding of the domain of time develop? What are the ingredients of our mental representations of time? Certainly some elements of time are apparent in our experience with the world. From experience, we might be able to learn that each moment in time only happens once, that we can only be in one place at one time, that we can never go back, and that many aspects of our experience are not permanent (i.e., faculty meetings are not everlasting, but rather begin and end at certain times). In other words, our experience dictates that time is a phenomenon in which we, the observer, experience continuous unidirectional change that may be marked by appearance and disappearance of objects and events. These aspects of conceptual time should be universal across cultures and languages. Indeed, this appears to be the case. In order to capture the sequential order of events, time is generally conceived as a one- dimensional, directional entity. Across languages, the spatial terms imported to talk about time are also one-dimensional, directional terms such as ahead/ behind or up / down rather than multidimensional or symmetric terms such as narrow/ wide or left / right (Clark, 1973; Traugott, 1978). Aspects of time that are extractable from world experience (temporally Time in English In English, we predominantly use front / back terms to talk about time. We can talk about the good times ahead of us or the hardships behind us. We can move meetings forward, push deadlines back, and eat dessert before we are done with our vegetables. On the whole, the terms used to order events are the same as those used to describe asymmetric horizontal spatial relations (e.g., ‘‘he took three steps forward’’ or ‘‘the dumpster is behind the store’’). Time in Mandarin Chinese In Mandarin, front / back spatial metaphors for time are also common (Scott, 1989). Mandarin speakers use the spatial morphemes qian (‘‘front’’) and hou (‘‘back’’) to talk about time. What makes Mandarin interesting for present purposes is that Mandarin speakers also systematically use vertical metaphors to talk about time (Scott, 1989). The spatial morphemes shang (‘‘up’’) and xia (‘‘down’’) are frequently used to talk about the order of events, weeks, months, semesters, and more. Earlier events are said to be shang or ‘‘up,’’ and later events are said to be xia or ‘‘down. ’’ Although in English vertical spatial terms can also be used to talk about time (e.g., ‘‘hand down knowledge from generation to generation’’ or ‘‘the meeting was coming up’’), these uses are not nearly as common or systematic as