There is a general consensus about the existence of a cognitive transfer by which we conceive time in terms of space, witnessed by the recurrence of this metaphor in many languages. We can distinguish two theoretical trends in the treatment of this conceptual metaphor: those based on universalistic apriorisms and those based on more relativistic and empirical assumptions. While the first tend to extrapolate from English, reducing this metaphor to very few basic models with a natural motivation, the second privilege Amerindian languages, with empirical data which do not fit in such speculative universals. This contrastive work on the two typologically distant languages Spanish and Chinese confirms the cross-linguistic productivity of other space-to-time associations ( reversed time , mirror time , vertical time , cyclic time ). Though our results show more similarities than differences in the overall available inventory, some specific divergences between Chinese and Spanish are also noted.

中文翻译：

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西班牙语和汉语中时间的空间概念化

关于认知迁移的存在，人们达成了一个普遍共识，即我们通过空间来构想时间，这一隐喻在许多语言中屡见不鲜。我们可以在对待这一概念隐喻的过程中区分出两种理论趋势：一种是基于普遍主义先验主义的趋势，另一种是基于相对论和经验假设的趋势。虽然第一种倾向于从英语推断出来，但由于自然的动机将这种隐喻简化为很少的基本模型，而第二种特权是美洲印第安人的语言，其经验数据不适合这种推测性的普遍性。西班牙语和汉语这两种在类型上相距遥远的语言的对比研究证实了其他时空关联（倒转时间，镜像时间，垂直时间，循环时间）的跨语言生产力。