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People often talk about time as if it were space: the future is ahead, a meeting can move later, and a duration can be long or short. Those expressions are not universal rules. Their forms vary across languages and communities, and studies of language, gesture, and clocks illuminate different parts of how people organize time.
Why do people describe time in spatial terms?
Temporal order and duration are abstract, so languages often express them through more tangible relations: forward and back, ahead and behind, long and short, or movement along a path. Timelines, calendars, graphs, and clock faces give such relations visible form. These patterns are one important way people represent time, but they do not show that every person or culture thinks about it identically.
A review of work on English, Mandarin, and bilingual speakers describes temporal reasoning as shaped by several interacting influences, including language, cultural artifacts, reference frames, and individual experience. Its account is a reminder not to treat a metaphor as the sole cause of a person’s temporal thinking. The study and its discussion of spatio-temporal metaphors outline those connections.
How do English and Mandarin differ?
Research comparing English and Mandarin reports a group-level difference in the spatial language used for time: English relies mainly on horizontal terms, while Mandarin uses vertical metaphors more often. The researchers also found spatial representations at work during temporal reasoning, with patterns consistent with linguistic and cultural experience. This is a comparison between studied groups, not a rule that predicts how every English or Mandarin speaker will describe time.
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The distinction matters because a language can offer more than one way to position events. A vertical expression and a horizontal one may both organize temporal order, while their frequency and use vary by language and context. Fuhrman and colleagues’ English–Mandarin study examines these linguistic and cultural forces.
Can learning a metaphor change how someone responds to time?
An experiment offers a bounded example. English-speaking participants learned vertical expressions such as “breakfast is above dinner” or “breakfast is below dinner.” In a subsequent nonlinguistic task, their responses were consistent with the metaphor they had learned. The result suggests that newly learned language can influence a particular temporal representation; it does not establish that language determines every aspect of thought or everyday time perception.
Hendricks and Boroditsky’s 2017 experiment is useful precisely because it tests a specific task rather than making a sweeping claim about all speakers.
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When does “move it right” mean later?
Expressions can also be local conventions. In a study of U.S. military speakers, “move the meeting right” meant reschedule it for later. The researchers documented this usage among military participants, but not among U.S. civilian participants in their studies. It is therefore an example of a community-specific expression, not a general instruction for interpreting “right” in all English conversation.
Hendricks, Bergen, and Marghetis examine how a metaphorical convention can become shared within a community.
What can historical language tell us about time?
Historical work on Old English studies spatial relations in time vocabulary across circular, vertical, and front–back (sagittal) axes. It shows that scholars can investigate how temporal language was organized in an earlier form of English, but this evidence alone does not provide a complete chronology showing exactly when or why one metaphor replaced another.
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The study of spatial relations in Old English vocabulary is evidence of historical variety, not a simple story of language moving steadily from metaphor to precision.
How did clocks become part of the talk of time?
Clock time is not just another metaphor. Time-telling has been tied to social practices and institutions, as well as to the ways literature represents duration and sequence. Scholarship on eighteenth-century literature and the Romantic period connects clocks and time-telling with temporal rationalization and regulation associated with emerging industrial-era institutions. The relationship was historically situated and reciprocal: social organization and literary forms could shape how time was represented, rather than one invention instantly changing everyone’s speech.
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Oxford Academic’s overview of literature and time in the eighteenth century and Romantic period discusses those connections.
How do communities encounter new ways of marking time?
Language about time can also change through cultural contact. A study of Bosavi in Papua New Guinea examines the introduction of European-based vocabularies and discourses for marking and keeping time during early colonial and missionary encounters. That is evidence about particular ways of marking time entering a community; it is not evidence that Bosavi people lacked concepts of time before those encounters.
“Marking Time: The Dichotomizing Discourse of Multiple Temporalities” treats this encounter as a question of competing or interacting temporal practices.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What do gestures reveal about learning time expressions?
People may gesture when explaining words such as “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” In one developmental study, gestures that did not match prevailing English-speaking mappings—past to the left or backward, future to the right or forward—became less frequent with age. This suggests that gesture and temporal language are connected in the studied setting, but the finding should not be generalized to every language, age group, or cultural context.
“Time Points: A Gestural Study of the Development of Space–Time Mappings” examines this relationship through participants’ gestures.
What changed—and what did not?
The evidence points to several kinds of change rather than one universal transition. Languages differ in their common spatial metaphors; communities can establish local expressions; people can learn new mappings; gestures develop; and clocks become embedded in particular social and historical settings. These are distinct findings from different methods, not interchangeable proof of a single account of how everyone came to speak about time.
For readers interested in the broader relationship between language and temporal metaphor, Cambridge University Press publishes Time, Metaphor, and Language (ISBN 9781107194038). Its subject is relevant further reading, not a prerequisite for understanding the examples here.
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