Distributions of Temporal Metaphors in Japanese

In the conceptual metaphor theory, it has been common to assume at least two metaphors where concepts of Time are structured through concepts of Space; Time-moving metaphor and Ego-moving metaphor. Several researchers carried out quantitative studies and revealed that languages have preferences on these Temporal metaphors: Ego-moving metaphor is more preferable in English and Chinese. This paper conducted a corpus-based research on the distributions of dual Temporal metaphors. This study observed Time-moving metaphor is more frequent in Japanese, contrary to the prediction from English and Chinese. This study clearly shows that most motion verbs have skewed distributions between Time-moving meaning and Ego-moving meaning and few verbs have “dual” usage at all in Japanese. In addition, this study’s data indicate Time-moving metaphor and Ego-moving metaphor are not mere variants of each other, but each metaphor has peculiar and complicated constraints on its usage.