This article addresses two previously unresolved puzzles regarding the relationship between temporal and spatial conceptualizations in Mandarin Chinese. First, apparently conflicting data have led to disagreement over whether temporal usages of the terms qian and hou, whose spatial meanings of ‘front’ and ‘back’ are often considered to be primary, are based on a canonical facing of Ego towards past or towards future. We argue that this issue can be resolved by positing invariant Sequential (S-)Time meanings of, respectively, earlier and later for these terms, with variable uses to refer to past and future events and perspectives in Deictic (D-)Time being secondary and contextually governed. Second, the question of which of the sagittal, vertical and lateral orientational axes are more fundamental in spatio-temporal language and cognition for Mandarin Chinese speakers has been much debated. We review these issues, propose solutions based on linguistic analysis and report five experiments to test the analysis. Our findings are consistent with our analysis of the primacy in Mandarin Chinese of the invariant S-time construal of the terms qian ‘front’ (=earlier) and hou ‘back’ (=later) over their contextually governed D-time interpretations as referring to pastness and futurity. We find also that the preferred lexicalization of temporal relations between events by Mandarin speakers involves the sagittal axis terms qian and hou, but this does not mean that this linguistic conceptualization is also imposed by speakers as a preference for the sagittal axis for non-linguistic representations of event sequences. Finally, our data indicate that the temporal meanings of qian and hou (earlier and later) are more salient for speakers than their spatial meanings (front and back) in motion event conceptualizations.

本文解决了两个以前未解决的关于普通话时间和空间概念化之间关系的难题。首先，显然相互矛盾的数据导致了关于“前”和“后”的空间含义通常被认为是主要的术语“前”和“后”的时间用法是否基于自我的规范面向过去或面向过去的分歧。未来。我们认为，这个问题可以通过为这些术语分别设置不变的顺序（S-）时间含义来解决，这些含义具有可变的用途在 Deictic (D-)Time 中指代过去和未来的事件和观点是次要的和上下文支配的。其次，对于说普通话的人来说，在时空语言和认知中，矢状轴、垂直轴和横向轴中哪一个更为基础一直存在争议。我们回顾了这些问题，提出了基于语言分析的解决方案，并报告了五个实验来测试分析。我们的研究结果与我们对汉语中术语qian 'front' (= early ) 和hou 'back' (= later ) 不变 S 时间解释的首要性的分析一致) 在他们的上下文支配的 D 时间解释为指的是过去和未来。我们还发现，普通话使用者对事件之间时间关系的首选词汇化涉及矢状轴术语qian和hou，但这并不意味着这种语言概念化也被说话者强加为对非语言表征的矢状轴的偏好的事件序列。最后，我们的数据表明，在运动事件概念化中，前和后的时间意义比它们的空间意义（前后）更显着。