Conclusions and implications for further research

The discussion presented in this paper illustrates the continuing improvement of Boroditsky’s and her colleagues’ attempts at examining the temporal-spatial association in Mandarin and English to support the linguistic relativity hypothesis. The process also reflects the kinds of problems that many researchers face when doing cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research in language and cognition. Boroditsky and her colleagues made significant progress from the initial attempts to test that language shapes thought in general, and then restricted it to the more specific conclusion about Mandarin and English;

later these continued attempts were extended to include both language and culture as the influencing factors on Mandarin and English speakers’ different modes of temporal perception; more recently, the linguistic influence on people’s conceptualization of time was examined from both immediate and long term perspectives. As the research goes forward, the author(s) tend(s) to be more cautious in the selection of participants, testing materials and the design of testing procedures. These also reflect the general tendency in the study of the relationship between language and thought with respect to spatio-temporal mappings.

However, there are still certain flaws in the existing literature, as exemplified in the last two attempts by Boroditsky and her colleagues: although the English and Mandarin proficiency levels of the participants were considered and restricted, the selection was still based on the subjects’ self-reported levels

of English and Mandarin. The participants’ language proficiency was not tested in an objective way. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish one level from another subjectively, even in one monolingual user, not to mention the situation where there are so many bilingual participants (in one study, around 200). The subjects’ self-perception of their language levels, like their temporal perceptions, might have been affected by other internal or external factors, such as their personalities – some people just tend to be more cautious or modest while making estimations.

In the meantime, the claim that language has an immediate effect on temporal perception still needs further examination. Existing experiments are either designed to test different groups of participants on the same token (as in the second experiment of the third attempt, described above) or the same group tested on different tokens (as in the first experiment of the fourth attempt, above). The experiment specially designed to test in-the-moment effect of spatio-temporal metaphors on people’s perceptions of time (the second experiment in the fourth study) falls into the loop of “people tend to think in A when talking about A”. Actually, this loop is untenable unless alternative explanatory pathways (e.g., there could be a possibility for people to “think in B when talking about A”) can be ruled out. There is still no sufficient evidence that immediate situational linguistic factors shape people’s perceptions of time.

The existing research has demonstrated firmly that Mandarin and English speakers have different temporal conceptualization models and the reasons why this occurs: it is due to different spatio-temporal expressions in the two languages and other cultural factors, such as writing and reading directions.

One domain which still needs further exploration is concerned with how the different time-perception models in the two languages occur. As already exemplified, English and Mandarin have different temporal perceptions because of their different spatio-temporal metaphors, but the ways in which English/

Mandarin metaphors are mapped onto their respective speakers’ perceptions of time is still an unexplored area. Cross-linguistic studies have found time and again that some, but not all spatial lexemes can be used in the temporal language (Shinohara, 1999), and different languages have different conflations of temporal cognition and spatial expression (Radden, 2004), which calls for further exploration is the situation in Mandarin and English.

Cross-linguistic studies which focus on the spatial and temporal systems in children have found that temporal and spatial systems emerge simultaneously

and have independent statuses in children’s minds, thus rejecting the claim that temporal distinctions are derived from spatial differences (Weist, Atanassova, Wysocka & Pawlak, 1999). And in a more recent study on a Turkish sign language, Arik (2012) notices mismatches between the participants’ temporal expressions and the deictic use of the front-back axis, suggesting that temporal and spatial language may not be derived from each other but might only share some properties at the lexical level. Thus, more empirical studies with carefully considered methodology need to be conducted in order to provide support for the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis, through the spatio-temporal mapping of language and cognition.

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A sense of (dis)continuity: Searching for novelistic expression