Abstract

Language bridges mind and world, with metaphor structuring abstract concepts. Spatial metaphors map physical space onto abstract domains, framing cognition and evaluation. As explicit questionnaires fail to capture implicit attitudes, this study operationalizes spatial metaphors as an indirect tool to assess English majors’ attitudes toward four course types.

In the behavioral task, thirty-two senior English majors freely positioned four courses along both a vertical and a horizontal axis within a 3×3 grid, followed by a course evaluation questionnaire. The study examined three core questions: whether vertical and horizontal positions are consistently interpreted as affective preference and instrumental value; whether the two spatial metaphors serve different evaluative functions; and whether spatial positions correspond systematically with explicit evaluations. Results show that vertical positions correspond to students’ affective preferences, while horizontal positions reflect perceived importance. Questionnaire data further support the spatial evaluation pattern of “UP IS GOOD” and “RIGHT IS IMPORTANT.”

These findings indicate that spatial conceptual metaphors function not only as cognitive representations but also as viable cues for implicit attitude assessment, offering a novel methodological perspective for evaluating university English courses.

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