Abstract

Time is an abstract concept which is invisible and intangible. The traditional framework of contrastive studies of English and Chinese temporal metaphors are at three basic levels-“spatial metaphors”, “ontological metaphors” and “structural metaphors”. However, this framework is obscure in boundaries and overlapping in areas. Therefore, on the basis of rhetorics, this research is carried out in a novel framework from the perspective of culture on six aspects: ‘personalized temporal metaphors’, ‘materialized temporal metaphors’, ‘event temporal metaphors’, ‘abstracted temporal metaphors’, ‘colorized temporal metaphors’ and ‘allusion temporal metaphors’. Furthermore, based on the linguistic phenomenon, the cultural implications of temporal metaphors are revealed.

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