Temporal Frames of Reference and its representation in the structure of Persian Speakers language based on conceptual metaphors theory

One of the metaphors that has gained a lot of attention is “Time is Space”. This Metaphor is based on a theory that we perceive an abstract concept like time through a concrete concept like space and conceptualize it in our mind and language. Consequently, this research attempts to examine space-time mapping in Persian based on conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Johnson & Lakaoff in order to find out temporal frames of reference and their sources in Persian.

As a result, six tasks were designed for 154 male and female students ranging from 18 to 54 years of age at Islamic Azad University of Khorramshahr and Abadan Medical University.

Samples’ Percentage and frequency of occurrence illustrated that lateral axis from right to left adopted from Persian writing direction; sagittal axis back to front adopted from walking direction, looking direction, linguistic metaphors; lateral axis from left to right adopted from mathematics writing direction are the main sources of adoption of abstract temporal concepts in Persian. In addition, absolute frame of reference was the major frame of reference in all tasks. Intrinsic and relative frames of references were also used by the participants.

This research implied that the adopted frame of reference and the type of sagittal or lateral axes are strongly influenced by type of task, pattern and design of the experiment, the given concepts, language and linguistic metaphors, and cultural artifacts.