Temporal scenery
Experiential bases for deictic concepts of time in East Asian languages
The present article analyzes the conceptual patterns of temporal deixis in Ainu,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Ryukyuan. It demonstrates that Lakoff and
Johnson’s notions ‘moving time’ and ‘moving observer’ are more or less applicable
to the five East Asian languages but are not necessarily mutually exclusive
conceptions. Deictic expressions of time in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean can
presuppose both moving time and moving observer, while comparable expressions
in Ainu and Ryukyuan, only moving time. It is argued that Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean have busier “temporal scenery” for expressions of temporal
deixis than Ainu and Ryukyuan do.