Abstract
Corpus-based, this study compares differences in the reference frames for spatiotemporal metaphors in Chinese 前/后 (qian/hou) and Japanese 前/後 (mae/ato, and the Sino-Japanese zen/go). A bilingual corpus centered on the CCL and the BCCWJ was constructed, and randomly sampled entries were manually annotated to distinguish the Ego-Perspective (EGO-P), which takes the ego as reference, from Sequence-as-Position (SAP), which takes event positions as reference. The data show that Chinese qian/hou display high semantic plasticity They can realize EGO-P mappings of “future-in-front/past-behind” while also functioning as SAP markers of sequence position. By contrast, Japanese mae/ato (and zen/go) tend toward semantic specialization, operating primarily within the SAP framework, with weaker lexicalization into EGO-P, and distributional statistics support this conclusion. This contrast reveals an internal tension, Chinese, via verbalization or nominalization, can present an embodied ego while also encoding sequencing through positional words or fixed collocations. Japanese more often semanticizes the mapping into serialized temporal markers, showing stronger constraints of grammaticalization. This difference is related not only to lexicalization pathways and register choice but may also be shaped by the combined influences of religious culture, social environment, and the historical patterns of language contact.
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Data availability
The raw data used in this study were obtained from publicly accessible corpora, including the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/index.jsp) corpus and the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (https://chunagon.ninjal.ac.jp/bccwj-nt/search), which can be accessed through their respective official websites. The datasets generated and analyzed in the course of this study, including extracted samples and annotated data, are not publicly available at this stage, as they will be used in the author’s ongoing and future research. Upon reasonable academic request, the data can be made available in a manner that does not compromise subsequent research.
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Jin, T. Divergent reference frames in Chinese and Japanese spatiotemporal metaphors: a cross-cultural study of multidimensional mapping in Qian/Hou and Mae/Ato. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06664-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-06664-8
