Abstract:
Where does time come from? Time is related to object motion, and a typical example is the movement of the sun.This is the basic fact and embodied cognition in relation to Chinese time evolution.Based on this notion, we propose the hypothesis of Event Spatiotemporal Hermaphroditism: an event is composed of moving bodies, space and time, which co-exist and co-change, forming a line of event spatiotemporal hermaphroditism.From this hypothesis, we can infer two types of relevance of event to time and their expression in Chinese: the metonymic one(which provides metonymic motivation for the lexical meaning derivation of time from space and the contextual connection between time and event) and the non-metonymic one(which provides explanation for the event-time connection in sentence and discourse).Examining space and time in a panoramic view of event, this study proves the connection between event and time, and ascertains the fundamentality of time metonymy.