Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 132, Issue 3, September 2014, Pages 342-382
Cognition

Mapping spatial frames of reference onto time: A review of theoretical accounts and empirical findings

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.03.016Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Theoretical accounts on temporal frames of reference are systematized.

  • Cross-linguistic data on temporal representations is reviewed.

  • Despite variability in detail, absolute referencing in time is generally prevailing.

  • An integrated account is proposed to support cross-domain investigations.

Abstract

When speaking and reasoning about time, people around the world tend to do so with vocabulary and concepts borrowed from the domain of space. This raises the question of whether the cross-linguistic variability found for spatial representations, and the principles on which these are based, may also carry over to the domain of time. Real progress in addressing this question presupposes a taxonomy for the possible conceptualizations in one domain and its consistent and comprehensive mapping onto the other—a challenge that has been taken up only recently and is far from reaching consensus. This article aims at systematizing the theoretical and empirical advances in this field, with a focus on accounts that deal with frames of reference (FoRs). It reviews eight such accounts by identifying their conceptual ingredients and principles for space–time mapping, and it explores the potential for their integration. To evaluate their feasibility, data from some thirty empirical studies, conducted with speakers of sixteen different languages, are then scrutinized. This includes a critical assessment of the methods employed, a summary of the findings for each language group, and a (re-)analysis of the data in view of the theoretical questions. The discussion relates these findings to research on the mental time line, and explores the psychological reality of temporal FoRs, the degree of cross-domain consistency in FoR adoption, the role of deixis, and the sources and extent of space–time mapping more generally.

Introduction

When speaking about time, people around the world tend to do so with vocabulary and concepts borrowed from the domain of space (Alverson, 1994, Clark, 1973, Haspelmath, 1997, Traugott, 1978). This link reaches beyond the extension of word meaning. For instance, co-speech gestures often add a spatial dimension to temporal expressions (Núñez et al., 2012, Núñez and Sweetser, 2006); postural sway is affected by whether people embark on a mental time travel into the future or the past (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, 2010); and spatial primes can be used to influence the experience of duration (DeLong, 1981), visuospatial attention (Torralbo et al., 2006, Weger and Pratt, 2008), or reasoning about time (e.g., Boroditsky and Ramscar, 2002, Gentner et al., 2002). In fact, time and space, together with quantity, appear to be computed by a generalized magnitude system of the brain (Walsh, 2003), with temporal relations being mapped onto spatial representations, but not vice versa (Casasanto and Boroditsky, 2008, Casasanto et al., 2010), at least in humans (Merritt, Casasanto, & Brannon, 2010).

In parallel, evidence has accumulated that different groups of people conceptualize space in different ways (Bennardo, 2002, Haun et al., 2006, Haun et al., 2011, Levinson, 2003, Levinson and Wilkins, 2006, Majid et al., 2004, Senft, 1997), and this raises important questions. If, for instance, the link between space and time is indeed universal, should we then expect that the cross-cultural variability found for spatial representations will carry over to the domain of time? And to what extent might culture-specific ways of talking about space also structure talking about time? Real progress in addressing these questions, we argue, presupposes a taxonomy for the possible conceptualizations in one domain and its concise and comprehensive mapping onto the other. Such a harmonizing of terminology would facilitate not only cross-domain comparisons in general, but also the assessment of the influence of spatial representations on temporal ones in particular, and is therefore currently considered to be one of the important desiderata in this field of research (Bender et al., 2012, Tenbrink, 2011).

However, while research in the two domains and the acknowledgement of cross-domain transfers do have a long tradition in several disciplines (reviewed in Núñez & CooperriSampaio, da Silva Sinha, and Sinha der, 2013), the challenge of mapping a taxonomy of spatial representations onto the domain of time has been taken up only recently. During the last decade, respective attempts have mushroomed, but although several of them even sail under the same flag as “temporal frames of reference”, they differ considerably in terms of theoretical conceptualization and subsequent interpretation of data—to the extent of being incompatible with each other. All too often it has been left to the reader to figure out how these accounts are related to each other, to spatial taxonomies, and to the empirical data accumulated during recent years. Núñez and Cooperrider therefore conclude that “despite intuitive appeal and promise of parsimony, a definitive taxonomy of ‘temporal frames of reference’ remains elusive” (2013, p. 221). With our review, we attempt to systematize the theoretical and empirical advances in this field, by sorting the temporal accounts proposed so far according to their similarities and differences, by comparing the principles according to which they map spatial taxonomies onto time, and by scrutinizing the available data with regard to how they would be interpreted in the light of each of these accounts.

More specifically, we begin (in Section 2) by describing the theoretical and conceptual ingredients on which most of the accounts are based, including a brief outline of the properties and variants of the concept time and of the conceptual sources for the construal of temporal taxonomies. In Section 3, we provide an overview of the different taxonomies, followed, in Section 4, by their systematic comparison according to the relations they establish between conceptual sources, the principles they adopt for construing frames of reference and for assigning front, and the reference patterns they distinguish.

The second part of this review is then devoted to a (re-)analysis of the available empirical data, collected partly as evidence for conceptual innovations of specific accounts and partly with the goal of assessing cross-cultural variability. Based on an overview of the methods employed (Section 5), findings are first presented separately for each speech community (Section 6), and are then discussed with regard to their theoretical implications (Section 7). The potential for integration is outlined in the conclusion (Section 8).

Before doing so, two constraints need to be explicated and one clarification should be made. First, this review does not presuppose that all temporal conceptualizations are derived from space. In fact, some properties of time and temporal entities cannot be spatialized (Galton, 2011), and some linguistic groups appear to generalize this to the whole domain of time (e.g., Sinha, Da Silva Sinha, Zinken, & Sampaio, 2011, and see Section 6.9 below). However, as the main thrust of this paper is to provide an overview of temporal taxonomies based on the spatialization of time, it will focus on temporal conceptualizations derived from space. Second, this review will be restricted to theoretical accounts that are based on, or at least related to, some type of frames of reference (FoRs) taxonomy. While there may be other taxonomies of spatial conceptualizations (and more options for mapping them onto time), this restriction is justified by the fact that most of the accounts that have been proposed recently and that are of relevance for this review have chosen this approach. And finally, our usage of the terms “cultural” and “linguistic” requires some a priori clarification. Although we basically utilize cross-linguistic data (i.e., data collected in groups speaking different languages), we will adopt the term “cultural” whenever preferences for some kind of FoR are referred to. The rationale for this is that preferences for FoRs within a speech community are not inherent in the meaning of words, or in any language-specific feature for that matter, but are a result of agreements or conventions within a speech community—which we take to be a cultural phenomenon.

Throughout this paper, some abbreviations will be used as a compromise between conciseness and readability (explained in Table 1, upper part). We also attempt to use the same terms throughout the paper when referring to the same referents; in cases where being faithful to alternative accounts requires deviations from this terminology (for an overview, see Table 1, lower part), we will add the labels preferred in this review in square brackets.

Section snippets

The domain of time and its relation to space

Time is an abstract domain in the sense that it is intangible and ephemeral, and that we lack sensory organs to perceive it directly. The ability to process temporal information is based on two distinct computational mechanisms (Pöppel, 1997, Pöppel and Wittmann, 1999), and the awareness of the passing of time is linked to memory processes (Lewis & Miall, 2006). But our attempts to capture time conceptually seem to hinge to a considerable degree on metaphorical extension (Lakoff and Johnson,

Accounts for mapping spatial frames of reference onto time

For just one decade now, attempts have been undertaken to map a taxonomy of spatial frames of reference (s-FoR) to the domain of time, and these attempts already encompass more than half a dozen different variants. In this review, the following accounts will be considered:

  • the Ego-based vs. field-based frames of reference account by Moore, 2004, Moore, 2006, Moore, 2011;

  • the reference-point (RP) metaphors account by Núñez and Sweetser (2006);

  • the temporal framework models account by Kranjec (2006);

Comparison of accounts

As we have seen above, most accounts make use of the same set of conceptual components for construing temporal FoRs (which is partly obscured by idiosyncratic labeling), but combine them in distinct ways. As one consequence, each of the accounts proposed so far differs in substantial ways from any other account. In this section, we attempt to analyze similarities and differences between the accounts by addressing the following questions: (1) How are the conceptual sources related to each other

Empirical investigations: methods and tasks

Regardless of how thoroughly scholars may have designed their cross-domain taxonomies for frames of reference, the question of whether and how people really do transfer spatial conceptualizations into the domain of time—or are otherwise affected by spatial cues when engaging in temporal reasoning—can only be answered through empirical investigations. For the following overview, some thirty studies were scrutinized, which differ with regard to the theoretical stance they took, the methods they

Empirical evidence

The following overview comprises some thirty empirical studies on temporal representations and space–time mapping. With few exceptions, none of these studies explicitly addresses temporal FoRs; however, their findings are relevant and instructive for assessing the theoretical accounts presented in the first part of this review. The studies compiled here include, in total, speakers of sixteen different languages, which will be pooled into nine clusters based on relatedness. Although some of the

Theoretical implications

One of the main purposes of this review is to scrutinize the accounts of temporal frames of reference (FoRs) proposed to date in the light of the available empirical data. More precisely, we intend to investigate whether and how these data would be interpreted by each of these accounts, and whether and to what extent they are compatible with their theoretical predictions. To this end, we will now look at the empirical findings with the following questions in mind: Which properties and concepts

Conclusion

The conceptual relations of space and time are manifold and complex. Time and space share four properties to varying extents. Some of the speech communities included in this review are reported to emphasize the least shared property transience and thus to avoid space–time mappings entirely. Most others, however, use spatialized representations of time that exhibit the shared properties extension, linearity, and direction. These representations reflect three different spatial concepts of time

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article took place during our stay at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld and was supported by a Heisenberg Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (Be 2451/8-1,2) to Andrea Bender and by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG for the project on “Spatial referencing across languages: Cultural preferences and cognitive implications” to Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller (Be 2451/13-1, Be 2178/7-1). We are

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