现代汉语“前”和“后”的过去义和未来义的不对称 现象探讨 — 以Lakoff&Johnson的时间隐喻为理论基础

Abstract

“前”表示过去义和未来义，而“后”偏向于表示未来义。对于“前”、“后”在表达时间义上显示的不对称现象，前人研究大部分着重于“前”、“后”本身语义的研究以及二者能否构成反义词的研究。 对于“前”、“后”时间语义分析，前人大部分采用Lakoff&Johnson(1999)的“时间在动”和“自我在动”两种隐喻模式。本文在前人研究的基础上，根据Lakoff&Johnson(1999)所提出的时间隐喻理论下的四个模式，即“时间定位的静态模式隐喻(过去在前、过去在后)”以及“时间定位的动态模式隐喻(时间在动、自我在动)”,对于“前”、“后”在表达时间义的分布及数量上显示的不均匀现象，进行了更全面地定性研究。本文通过查找词典和语料库所包含的“前”、“后”的表达方式发现，大部分的“前”、“后”不与“时间在动”模式结合。因为空间具有静态性，所以原本表方位概念的“前”和“后”表示时间时自然地适用于“时间定位的静态模式”，即时间是不动的。而且大部分的“后”不与“自我在动”模式结合。这种现象是因为，在“自我在动”模式下，观察者的前方是未来，观察者在行走时，会凝视着前方,不会刻意地关注身后风景。“前”、“后”时间义数量分布的不均匀取决于二者与“自我在动”的结合与否。

In Modern Mandarin, qian denotes the past as well as the future, whereas the temporal denotations of hou tends to be the future. This work investigates how and why the distribution of temporal denotations of direction nouns qian and hou shows such asymmetry, based on the notion of metaphorical orientation of time (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). Our corpus study shows that qian and hou are not associated with MOVING TIME metaphor, contrasting the findings from previous works. Rather qian and hou are shown to be frequently associated with the prototypical metaphor for time, i.e., TIME ORIENTATION metaphor: in THE PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO, qian denotes the past, and hou denotes the future; in THE PAST IS BEHIND EGO, qian denotes the future, and hou denotes the past. We further argue that qian and hou inherently denote static spatial notion, and thus it is naturally expected that these direction nouns are not used as MOVING TIME metaphor in which time is considered as a moving object. In our corpus analysis, only qian, but not a single instance of hou, was found to be associated with MOVING EGO metaphor, an extended system from THE PAST IS BEHIND EGO. This difference results in hou’s tendency of having a much fewer instances of the past denotation than qian. Such phenomenon is expected because on THE MOVING EGO system, the ego’s natural observation and description of the environment would involve forward scene rather than backward scene while moving along the path on the time axis towards the future.