Mapping spatial frames of reference onto time: A review of theoretical accounts and empirical findings

Cognition 132 (2014) 342–382

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Mapping spatial frames of reference onto time: A review of theoretical accounts and empirical findings Andrea Bender ⇑, Sieghard Beller Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, N-5020 Bergen, Norway

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 15 May 2013 Revised 30 November 2013 Accepted 31 March 2014

Keywords: Space Time Frames of reference Temporal perspectives Mental time line Space–time mapping

a b s t r a c t When speaking and reasoning about time, people around the world tend to do so with vocabulary and concepts borrowed from the domain of space. This raises the question of whether the cross-linguistic variability found for spatial representations, and the principles on which these are based, may also carry over to the domain of time. Real progress in addressing this question presupposes a taxonomy for the possible conceptualizations in one domain and its consistent and comprehensive mapping onto the other—a challenge that has been taken up only recently and is far from reaching consensus. This article aims at systematizing the theoretical and empirical advances in this field, with a focus on accounts that deal with frames of reference (FoRs). It reviews eight such accounts by identifying their conceptual ingredients and principles for space–time mapping, and it explores the potential for their integration. To evaluate their feasibility, data from some thirty empirical studies, conducted with speakers of sixteen different languages, are then scrutinized. This includes a critical assessment of the methods employed, a summary of the findings for each language group, and a (re-)analysis of the data in view of the theoretical questions. The discussion relates these findings to research on the mental time line, and explores the psychological reality of temporal FoRs, the degree of cross-domain consistency in FoR adoption, the role of deixis, and the sources and extent of space–time mapping more generally. Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction When speaking about time, people around the world tend to do so with vocabulary and concepts borrowed from the domain of space (Alverson, 1994; Clark, 1973; Haspelmath, 1997; Traugott, 1978). This link reaches beyond the extension of word meaning. For instance, co-speech gestures often add a spatial dimension to temporal expressions (Núñez, Cooperrider, Doan, & Wassmann, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006); postural sway is affected by whether people embark on a mental time travel into the future or the past (Miles, Nind, & Macrae, ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Bender). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.03.016 0010-0277/Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

2010); and spatial primes can be used to influence the experience of duration (DeLong, 1981), visuospatial attention (Torralbo, Santiago, & Lupiáñez, 2006; Weger & Pratt, 2008), or reasoning about time (e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002). In fact, time and space, together with quantity, appear to be computed by a generalized magnitude system of the brain (Walsh, 2003), with temporal relations being mapped onto spatial representations, but not vice versa (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Casasanto, Fotakopoulou, & Boroditsky, 2010), at least in humans (Merritt, Casasanto, & Brannon, 2010). In parallel, evidence has accumulated that different groups of people conceptualize space in different ways (Bennardo, 2002; Haun, Rapold, Call, Janzen, & Levinson, 2006; Haun, Rapold, Janzen, & Levinson, 2011; Levinson,

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2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun, & Levinson, 2004; Senft, 1997), and this raises important questions. If, for instance, the link between space and time is indeed universal, should we then expect that the cross-cultural variability found for spatial representations will carry over to the domain of time? And to what extent might culture-specific ways of talking about space also structure talking about time? Real progress in addressing these questions, we argue, presupposes a taxonomy for the possible conceptualizations in one domain and its concise and comprehensive mapping onto the other. Such a harmonizing of terminology would facilitate not only cross-domain comparisons in general, but also the assessment of the influence of spatial representations on temporal ones in particular, and is therefore currently considered to be one of the important desiderata in this field of research (Bender, Rothe-Wulf, Hüther, & Beller, 2012; Tenbrink, 2011). However, while research in the two domains and the acknowledgement of cross-domain transfers do have a long tradition in several disciplines (reviewed in Núñez & Cooperrider, 2013), the challenge of mapping a taxonomy of spatial representations onto the domain of time has been taken up only recently. During the last decade, respective attempts have mushroomed, but although several of them even sail under the same flag as ‘‘temporal frames of reference’’, they differ considerably in terms of theoretical conceptualization and subsequent interpretation of data—to the extent of being incompatible with each other. All too often it has been left to the reader to figure out how these accounts are related to each other, to spatial taxonomies, and to the empirical data accumulated during recent years. Núñez and Cooperrider therefore conclude that ‘‘despite intuitive appeal and promise of parsimony, a definitive taxonomy of ‘temporal frames of reference’ remains elusive’’ (2013, p. 221). With our review, we attempt to systematize the theoretical and empirical advances in this field, by sorting the temporal accounts proposed so far according to their similarities and differences, by comparing the principles according to which they map spatial taxonomies onto time, and by scrutinizing the available data with regard to how they would be interpreted in the light of each of these accounts. More specifically, we begin (in Section 2) by describing the theoretical and conceptual ingredients on which most of the accounts are based, including a brief outline of the properties and variants of the concept TIME and of the conceptual sources for the construal of temporal taxonomies. In Section 3, we provide an overview of the different taxonomies, followed, in Section 4, by their systematic comparison according to the relations they establish between conceptual sources, the principles they adopt for construing frames of reference and for assigning FRONT, and the reference patterns they distinguish. The second part of this review is then devoted to a (re-)analysis of the available empirical data, collected partly as evidence for conceptual innovations of specific accounts and partly with the goal of assessing crosscultural variability. Based on an overview of the methods employed (Section 5), findings are first presented separately for each speech community (Section 6), and are then

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discussed with regard to their theoretical implications (Section 7). The potential for integration is outlined in the conclusion (Section 8). Before doing so, two constraints need to be explicated and one clarification should be made. First, this review does not presuppose that all temporal conceptualizations are derived from space. In fact, some properties of time and temporal entities cannot be spatialized (Galton, 2011), and some linguistic groups appear to generalize this to the whole domain of time (e.g., Sinha, Da Silva Sinha, Zinken, & Sampaio, 2011, and see Section 6.9 below). However, as the main thrust of this paper is to provide an overview of temporal taxonomies based on the spatialization of time, it will focus on temporal conceptualizations derived from space. Second, this review will be restricted to theoretical accounts that are based on, or at least related to, some type of frames of reference (FoRs) taxonomy. While there may be other taxonomies of spatial conceptualizations (and more options for mapping them onto time), this restriction is justified by the fact that most of the accounts that have been proposed recently and that are of relevance for this review have chosen this approach. And finally, our usage of the terms ‘‘cultural’’ and ‘‘linguistic’’ requires some a priori clarification. Although we basically utilize cross-linguistic data (i.e., data collected in groups speaking different languages), we will adopt the term ‘‘cultural’’ whenever preferences for some kind of FoR are referred to. The rationale for this is that preferences for FoRs within a speech community are not inherent in the meaning of words, or in any language-specific feature for that matter, but are a result of agreements or conventions within a speech community—which we take to be a cultural phenomenon. Throughout this paper, some abbreviations will be used as a compromise between conciseness and readability (explained in Table 1, upper part). We also attempt to use the same terms throughout the paper when referring to the same referents; in cases where being faithful to alternative accounts requires deviations from this terminology (for an overview, see Table 1, lower part), we will add the labels preferred in this review in square brackets.

2. The domain of time and its relation to space Time is an abstract domain in the sense that it is intangible and ephemeral, and that we lack sensory organs to perceive it directly. The ability to process temporal information is based on two distinct computational mechanisms (Pöppel, 1997; Pöppel & Wittmann, 1999), and the awareness of the passing of time is linked to memory processes (Lewis & Miall, 2006). But our attempts to capture time conceptually seem to hinge to a considerable degree on metaphorical extension (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). While not the only possible candidate (Evans, 2003), one domain which suggests itself as a source for such a metaphorical extension is space. Not only is space more concrete than time; it is also linked in various ways to the latter, for instance in all processes of change or motion. But before we turn to the various ways in which space is fundamental to time, thus allowing for the transfer

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Table 1 Abbreviations and variations of technical terms as used in this paper. Abbreviations FoR s-FoR t-FoR F G V X RP R ME MT Technical terms absolute FoR intrinsic FoR relative FoR

frame of reference spatial frame of reference temporal frame of reference Figure; also: ‘‘referent R’’ (see below) Ground; also: ‘‘relatum’’ (Tenbrink, 2011) or ‘‘reference point RP’’ (see below) observer’s viewpoint (in temporal contexts often equated with Ego) origin (origo) of the coordinate system in establishing a FoR; in ternary relations (relative FoR), X is transferred from V into G, which then becomes the origo of the secondary coordinate system (X2) reference point (as used by Núñez & Sweetser, 2006, and Yu, 2012) [= G] referent (as used by Yu, 2012) [= F] moving Ego (perspective); also: ‘‘Ego-moving’’ (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Gentner et al., 2002) moving time (perspective); also: ‘‘time-moving’’ (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000; Gentner et al., 2002) preferred for this paper, and some of their variants also referred to as: ‘‘field-based’’ (Talmy, 2000; and see Moore, 2004, 2011) or ‘‘extrinsic’’ (Kranjec, 2006) also referred to as: ‘‘ground-based’’ (Talmy, 2000) also referred to as: ‘‘projector-based’’ (Talmy, 2000), ‘‘deictic’’ (e.g., Kranjec, 2006), ‘‘egocentric’’, or ‘‘viewer-centered’’ (elsewhere in the literature)

Note. Some terms are used in capital letters when they denote concepts of things (as the concept of TIME) or, in the specific case of FRONT, do distinguish FRONT assigned to entities or fields from ‘‘front’’ in the ‘normal’ sense.

of spatial conceptualizations to time in the first place (Moore, 2011), we need to explicate the ways in which space and time differ. 2.1. Properties and concepts of time Attempts to describe and analyze time are plentiful (for overviews see, e.g., Evans, 2003; Friedmann, 1990; Le Poidevin, 2003; Newton-Smith, 1980), and we will not repeat these here. But in order to identify the conceptual ingredients of space-based taxonomies of temporal FoRs

and to compare these taxonomies in a constructive manner, the following aspects need to be explicated: (i) the extent to which properties of time itself can (or cannot) be mapped onto the spatial dimension, (ii) the extent to which concepts of time may vary, and (iii) the ways in which the directionality of time can be assessed. 2.1.1. Properties of time According to Galton’s (2011) commendable analysis, time has four distinct properties (or attributes), which it shares—to varying degrees—with space: extension, linear-

Table 2 Properties of time and how they can (or cannot) be mapped onto the spatial dimension (for more details, see Galton, 2011); further explanation is given in the text.

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Table 3 Concepts of time.

ity, directionality, and transience. Extension implies that time has separate parts (such as distinct moments); linearity implies that of any three distinct moments, one has to be between the other two; directionality implies an asymmetry between past and future; and transience implies the fleetingness of every single moment. These four properties constitute an ordered series, with extension being foundational to linearity, which itself is foundational to directionality, which is foundational to transience (see Table 2). Parallel to this increase in hierarchical order, the extent to which these properties can be mapped onto space decreases. While mapping is straightforward for the property of extension, it is possible for linearity only if any one of the three dimensions of space is singled out. Please note that this may also include closed loops. In addition to the restriction to one dimension, the mapping of asymmetry from time to space also requires consideration of specific conditions under which this property may emerge: The asymmetry between UP and DOWN relies on gravitation, the asymmetry between FRONT and BACK on the anatomy of the human body, and the asymmetry between LEFT and RIGHT (largely) on cultural values. A less obvious, but nonetheless valid, asymmetry also emerges from the half-axes that are radiating out from a central point, namely along the TOWARDS/AWAY FROM, NEAR/FAR, or INWARDS/OUTWARDS dimension. Transience, finally, is the only property of time that space cannot have in and of itself. However, space can acquire it by being linked to time, as in motion (Galton, 2011). When traveling by train, for instance, the places passed by are transient in a way similar to the elapsed moments. In contrast to changes of place during motion, changes of state involve only a negligible spatial component and thus might be regarded as almost purely temporal. This temporal transience is captured by a concept of time not as spatially extended, but simply as a perpetual ‘‘getting later’’, as has been described for the Hopi by Whorf (1956; and see Malotki, 1983). When time is metaphorically mapped onto space, the property of extension leads to the description of events as ‘‘occupying space’’ or being ‘‘in the middle of’’ something. Linearity affords linguistic metaphors of duration, but also graphic and other representational metaphors (as in writ-

ing, musical notation, the time axis of graphs, or the design of clocks). Directionality allows for the mapping of asymmetric spatial axes onto time, as in the mapping of past and future to the TOP/DOWN axis in Mandarin (Scott, 1989) or as in the Moving Ego (ME) and Moving Time (MT) metaphors to be described below (Clark, 1973; Fillmore, 1971). As the ME/MT metaphors also involve motion, they make additional use of the property of transience (Galton, 2011). Of these properties, the latter three will be of relevance for the remainder of this paper: linearity for the concept of cyclical time (to be discussed in the next section); directionality for the asymmetric properties of time and temporal concepts, which is essential for the assignment of FRONT and thus for the construal of temporal FoRs; and transience for dynamic contexts that involve real or metaphorical motion.

2.1.2. Conceptual variants of time Three fundamentally different concepts of time will be considered in this review: linear, cyclical, and radial time (see Table 3). The concept of linear time is compatible with the experience of passing time and the irreversible courses of events. Typically, this concept also implies directionality, aptly illustrated in the metaphor of an ‘‘arrow of time’’ (Section 2.1.3). Its directionality is reflected, for instance, in diagrammatic depictions that are oriented towards the future (Galton, 2011), and it structures the canonical way in which we recount history or tell stories.1 Cognitive scientists tend to consider the linear concept as the prevailing concept of time in human thinking, and conceptualize its representation by a mental time line (Walsh, 2003; and see Miles et al., 2010; Weger & Pratt, 2008). While the concept of linear time seems to directly spring from the property of linearity, the latter also affords a concept of cyclical time, except that in this case the line forms a closed loop (Galton, 2011; and see Le Poidevin, 2003; Newton-Smith, 1980). The concept of cyclical time 1 This structure can be violated, of course, for various reasons, and if done artistically—as in the movie Memento (2000), directed by Christopher Nolan—this violation may be experienced as fascinating. However, one of the very reasons for the positive reviews of Memento was that its nonlinear narrative structure was considered unique and original.

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is compatible with our experience of recurring time periods that structure our life, such as times of the day, days of the week, seasons, or annual holidays and feasts, and recurring events, such as the life cycles of plants and animals. It has been described for several non-Western cultures such as Hinduism (Sharma, 1974), the Hopi (Malotki, 1983; Whorf, 1956), or the Maya (Farriss, 1987; León-Portilla, 1990). The linear and the cyclical concept can be reconciled and integrated into a spiral or helic concept according to which types of events do recur, but at different points in time and in a non-reversible order. The concept of radial (or ego-centric) time, finally, reflects the precision of memory (of the past) and anticipation (of the future), which is most pronounced for proximal events and decreases with distance from the subjective now, symmetrically into past and future. Like the aforementioned linear and cyclical concept, it is compatible with, and in fact follows directly from, the property of directionality when mapped onto space. However, as outlined above, the mapping of the asymmetry property from time to space requires a consideration of specific conditions under which this property may emerge, and one of these conditions involves the half-axes radiating out from a central point (Galton, 2011). Illustrative examples of this radiation are the loudness of sound or the brightness of light emitted from a single source, or the field of vision or attention from the point of view of any given observer. The concept of radial time has received the least amount of attention (but see Bennardo, 2009), and although it has been predicted to occur in speech communities, which prefer a relative (or ego-centric) FoR for temporal descriptions (Bender, Bennardo, & Beller, 2005), it remains unclear whether it only characterizes temporal aspects of cognitive processes or may also serve to structure representations of time (as claimed by Bender, Beller, & Bennardo, 2010).

2.1.3. The arrow of time An implication of Galton’s (2011) third property of time is the asymmetry between past and future, also labeled ‘‘arrow of time’’. This notion deserves particular attention here as it will be essential in some accounts for construing an absolute FoR. While most physical processes are symmetrical with regard to time (i.e., they could be reversed without violating physical laws), some appear to unfold over time from past to future. The increase of entropy, for instance, described by the second law of thermodynamics, bestows a direction onto the flow of time; and the same holds for the expansion of the universe, for radiation and radioactive decay, or for the course of biological evolution (Gould, 1987; Mackey, 2003). This directedness from past to future is captured by the ‘‘arrow of time’’ metaphor. Although its status in physics is not entirely uncontroversial (Price, 1996), it is reflected in some of our basic cognitive processes: The perception of events precedes memories of these events, and causes precede effects. Typically, the arrow of time is seen as pointing into the future, and for any concept based on this notion, FRONT in time would thus be assigned to the future (alternative views and assignments will be discussed further below).

2.2. Conceptual sources for taxonomies of temporal frames of reference Although this review focuses on the spatialization of time and in particular on the mapping of taxonomies of spatial frames of reference onto temporal relations, two other sources for these types of taxonomies also require attention as they are frequent ingredients for construals of temporal taxonomies: the distinction of A-series versus B-series, and the equally popular distinction of the Moving Ego (ME) versus Moving Time (MT) perspective. The heterogeneity in this field of research basically arises from the various ways in which these two temporal sources are combined with each other and with spatial notions. 2.2.1. Descriptions of time: A-series versus B-series One of the oldest research traditions in the domain of time goes back to an essay by the philosopher John McTaggart (1908) on ‘‘The Unreality of Time’’, in which he identifies two different descriptions of temporal order: the A-series versus B-series of time (see also Gell, 1992; Traugott, 1975). Broadly speaking, the A-series description of events follows from the way in which these events are ordered, as being in the past, present, or future, relative to an observer’s subjective now or deictic center. Being part of an A-series also involves a change of status for each and every event, which was once in the future, then becomes present, and will finally drift into the past (Fig. 1a). The B-series description, on the other hand, simply refers to the order of events within a sequence, in which one event precedes (‘‘is earlier than’’) or follows (‘‘is later than’’) another one, regardless of the point in time from which this may be observed (Fig. 1b). This distinction is captured by language in that A-series descriptions typically include tense, which requires anchoring in the speaker, and thus are deictic, whereas Bseries descriptions are based on sequencing (expressed by ‘‘earlier/before’’ and ‘‘later/after’’ relations), which requires an anchoring of events with respect to each other, and are thus non-deictic (Traugott, 1975, 1978). 2.2.2. Temporal perspectives: Moving Ego (ME) versus Moving Time (MT) If we think of time as a river, the direction of flow allows for two different, yet complementary, perspectives (see Table 4, left column): the Moving Ego (ME) and the Moving Time (MT) perspective (e.g., Clark, 1973; Fillmore, 1971). From the Moving Ego perspective, we regard ourselves as moving downstream through stationary time; we approach future events and leave them behind, as in (1). From the complementary Moving Time perspective, we regard ourselves as stationary and time

(a) A-series

(b) B-Series

deictic or tensed time

non-deictic or sequence time

Fig. 1. The A-series versus B-series of time.

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Table 4 Extending the Moving Ego (ME) and Moving Time (MT) perspective beyond deictic examples (A-series) to include non-deictic examples (Bseries).

Note. Non-deictic MT corresponds to the ‘‘Time-RP’’ metaphor (proposed by Núñez et al., 2006); non-deictic ME does not occur in English, but has been observed in Hausa (Hill, 1978), and in Japanese and Marathi (Shinohara & Pardeshi, 2011); further explanation is given in the text.

as moving towards us; future events approach us and pass by, as in (2): (1) (2)

‘‘We are approaching Tuesday.’’ ‘‘Tuesday is approaching (us).’’

[ME] [MT]

These two perspectives on time can be regarded as metaphoric systems which are accessed during information processing (for overviews, see Gentner, 2001; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). Either of these systems suggests one specific reading of ambiguous phrases like ‘‘moving a meeting forward’’ (Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976), priming either the ME or MT perspective shifts these readings more towards the future or the past, and switching from one system to the other incurs cognitive costs, as revealed by reaction time in consistent versus inconsistent mapping conditions (Boroditsky, 2000; Gentner et al., 2002; McGlone & Harding, 1998). ME and MT are simply two different perspectives on the exact same scene—mirror images or figure/ground reversals of each other (Talmy, 2000; Traugott, 1978): In (1), for instance, the figure (i.e., the entity to be located) is ‘‘we’’, and the ground (the entity in reference to which the figure is located) is Tuesday; in (2), it is the other way around. In their original version, the scenes depicted in a phrase like ‘‘moving forward next Wednesday’s meeting’’ involved a deictic center or Ego (implied in ‘‘next Wednesday’’), but the complementary relation of ME and MT also holds for non-deictic scenes (Bender et al., 2010). Consider the slightly rephrased non-deictic expression ‘‘moving forward

every Wednesday’s meeting’’: The perspective of time as moving from the future to the past (MT) would still suggest a pastwards reading, whereas the inverse perspective of temporal entities as moving from the past to the future (ME) would suggest a futurewards reading, as illustrated in the right-hand column of Table 4. Accordingly, nondeictic sentences like (3) will also count as MT: (3)

‘‘Monday comes before Tuesday.’’

[MT]

In this case, the metaphorical motion of events— triggered by their alignment in a sequence, in which earlier events are ‘‘in front of’’ later ones—resembles the moving time perspective from future to past. This raises the question of whether such (non-deictic) B-series descriptions could also be compatible with the reverse ME perspective. While the label ‘‘Moving Ego’’ may make this sound odd, there is actually no reason why it should be impossible or even implausible. The lack of evidence from linguistic examples in English alone does not suffice to assess such a claim. Although seemingly not a dominant phenomenon across languages, at least one condition is conceivable under which B-series descriptions would indeed be compatible with an ME perspective: When sequences of events are described with later events being ‘‘in front of’’ earlier ones, their alignment reflects the futurewards direction, which is otherwise characteristic of the ME perspective, as in (4), taken from Hill (1978, p. 536; and see Levinson & Majid, 2013; Shinohara & Pardeshi, 2011):

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(4)

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‘‘Tuesday is before Monday.’’

[MT]

In any case, the relationship between the ME and MT perspective on the one hand, and A- and B-series on the other, cannot be straightforward. While ME and MT are mirror images of each other (i.e., complementary perspectives on the same scene), A- and B-series are not; in fact, they are incommensurable with each other (McTaggart, 1908; Traugott, 1975, 1978). As we will see below, one of the reasons why the different accounts differ so much is because they define ME and MT perspectives differently (as being strictly deictic or not), and because they map them differently onto A- and B-series descriptions. 2.2.3. Spatial frames of reference (s-FoR) The theoretical construct of prime interest for this review is frames of reference, which were first designed

for space. Over the years, several different taxonomies have been proposed, with the taxonomy by Levinson (2003) being one of the most popular. It will be taken here as the reference point because it has served as the basis for assessing cross-linguistic variability in spatial references, and because it was employed as one of the conceptual sources in most recent attempts of space–time mappings (for alternative accounts, see also Bohnemeyer & O’Meara, 2012; Danziger, 2010; Talmy, 2000). In general, a frame of reference (FoR) is a coordinate system required to establish the position of a figure in reference to a ground from a given perspective (Talmy, 2000); sometimes, albeit not necessarily, this perspective coincides with the viewpoint of an observer. The taxonomy proposed by Levinson (2003) distinguishes three basic types: an absolute, an intrinsic, and three variants of a relative FoR, most of which are depicted in Fig. 2 (for detailed descriptions, see Bender et al., 2010, 2012; Levinson, 2003).

Fig. 2. Spatial frames of reference, s-FoR (adapted from Bender et al., 2010).

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The characterization of these FoRs requires the following components: a figure F (the object to be located), the ground object G (in reference to which F is located), and the origo and orientation of the coordinate system X. The viewpoint of the observer V is optional and relevant for the relative FoR only. The absolute FoR derives its orientation from a superordinate field outside F and G. As argued above (Table 2; and see Galton, 2011), space generally lacks directionality and asymmetry, even on Earth (and especially if one leaves aside the vertical dimension that, by virtue of gravitation, may be seen as ‘naturally’ directed). Assignment of orientation to the superordinate field therefore depends on cultural conventions and includes, for instance, the cardinal points, mountain slopes, prevailing wind directions, rivers, or the land-sea axis on small islands (Bennardo, 2000, 2002; Levinson, 2003; Senft, 1997). Importantly, neither the position of a potential observer nor the orientation of G is relevant for referencing. The cat in Fig. 2a would therefore be described as ‘‘east of the car’’.2 The intrinsic FoR derives its orientation from the ground entity G and can thus only be adopted if G is perceived as being directed. Although a large number of potential ground entities are asymmetric, this does not necessarily imply directionality. Assignment of orientation to such an entity therefore, again, depends on cultural conventions. In the case of animates this is typically based on looking direction; but even artifacts such as cars, computers, or chairs can be assigned a FRONT, depending, for instance, on how people normally interact with them or into which direction they tend to move (e.g., Bennardo, 2000; Clark, 1973). Crucially, this includes an observer, as long as this observer serves as the (primary) ground. The cat in Fig. 2b could therefore also be described as ‘‘in front of the car’’. The fact that a particular object may have an intrinsic orientation, however, only allows for, but does not determine, the choice of an intrinsic FoR. Again, the position of a potential observer, if different from G, is irrelevant when choosing an intrinsic FoR. The relative FoRs derive their orientation from the viewpoint V of an observer, which needs to be different from the ground object G to establish the ternary relation between F, G, and V that is constitutive of a relative FoR (Fig. 2c). As the position of F is still determined in reference to G, however, the primary coordinate system with origo X in V needs to be transferred into G. This secondary coordinate system (anchored in G = X2) can be established in three different ways, thus giving rise to the three variants of the relative FoR: by rotation, reflection, or translation. Of these three variants, reflection and rotation can only be distinguished in two-dimensional space; in one-dimensional space (or time, for that matter), they conflate and will thus be treated jointly as the reflection variant (Fig. 2d). These different construals have several implications, one of which is crucial for the mapping of spatial FoRs to 2

In Talmy’s (2000) account, the alignment of entities (e.g., in a queue) can provide directness and thus create orientation for an absolute FoR. This version of an absolute FoR is picked up by some scholars when construing temporal FoRs.

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the domain of time. With the reflection variant of the relative FoR (Fig. 2d), FRONT is assigned to a position between G and V or nearer to V, and BACK is assigned to a position beyond G or further away from V. With the translation variant of the relative FoR (Fig. 2e), the reverse is true. Please note that the relative FoRs correspond to the half-axes radiating out from a central point, identified by Galton (2011) as one possibility for mapping the directionality property of time to space. This gives rise to an asymmetry along the TOWARDS/AWAYWARDS dimension (see Table 2), with the reflection variant favoring the TOWARDS direction, and the translation variant favoring the AWAYWARDS direction. Most of the previous work on spatial FoRs has been concerned with documenting culture-specific preferences for specific FoRs (e.g., Bennardo, 2002; Haun et al., 2006, 2011; Hüther, Bentz, Spada, Bender, & Beller, 2013; Levinson, 2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Majid et al., 2004; Senft, 1997), and with exploring whether differences in these preferences also entail cognitive implications (Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch, 2002; versus Li & Gleitman, 2002; and see Haun et al., 2011; Li, Abarbanell, Papafragou, & Gleitman, 2011). In this review, we will focus on the question of whether preferences for a specific FoR in spatial contexts may carry over to the temporal domain. A conclusive answer to this question, however, requires a conclusive mapping of spatial FoRs onto time. The premises for such a mapping are given: Establishing the position of a figure in reference to a ground from a given perspective requires a frame of reference, in time as much as in space. And although space and time differ in various ways (Galton, 2011), the principles on which Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy is based are domain-general, as outlined above, and can therefore be applied equally well to both domains, as we aim to demonstrate in the remainder of this paper.

2.2.4. Other conceptual sources: route perspective versus survey perspective For the sake of completeness it should be noted that temporal perspectives have also been related to the literature on mental maps and spatial navigation. Jamalian and Tversky (2012), for instance, consider both the ME and MT perspective as analogous to a route (or intrinsic or egocentric) perspective in space, taken from an embedded viewpoint and with Ego as the reference point. In contrast, a calendar view on time is seen as analogous to a survey (or absolute) perspective on space, taken from an external viewpoint and with dates or events as the reference points. This account is too recent to have inspired much research yet, but should be kept in mind.

3. Accounts for mapping spatial frames of reference onto time For just one decade now, attempts have been undertaken to map a taxonomy of spatial frames of reference (s-FoR) to the domain of time, and these attempts already encompass more than half a dozen different variants. In this review, the following accounts will be considered:

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 the Ego-based vs. field-based frames of reference account by Moore (2004, 2006, 2011);  the reference-point (RP) metaphors account by Núñez and Sweetser (2006);  the temporal framework models account by Kranjec (2006);  the temporal frames of reference account by Zinken (2010);  the reference frames of space and time account by Tenbrink (2011); and  the temporal frames of reference (t-FoR) account by Bender, Bennardo, and Beller (2005; see also Bender et al., 2010). Two other accounts will be considered merely in passing:  the time-referent vs. human-referent distinction by Yu (2012). and  the route vs. survey perspective account by Jamalian and Tversky (2012). The review will take note only of those aspects that are relevant to the question under scrutiny, namely how these accounts make use of, and attempt to integrate, the conceptual sources for temporal taxonomies, including A-/B-series, ME/MT perspectives, and frames of reference (overview in Table 5). For any other detail of these accounts and for the often elaborate metaphorical mappings, the reader is advised to consult the respective articles. 3.1. Ego-based versus field-based frames of reference (Moore) The account proposed by Moore (2004, 2006) provides one of the first attempts to combine temporal perspectives with a frame of reference notion (albeit initially not related to any of the spatial FoR taxonomies). He takes the dichotomy of the ME versus MT perspective as the starting point, but expands their scope beyond examples of the A-series by distinguishing the MT perspective further into ‘‘Egocentered Moving Time’’ and a non-deictic MT, which are captured by an Ego-based versus field-based frame of reference, respectively (Table 5a). For the Ego-based frame of reference, Ego serves as the reference point. The Ego-based frame of reference thus involves a deictic center and in this respect corresponds to the A-series of time, as in (5): (5)

‘‘Tuesday is approaching (us).’’

[= (2)]

[Ego-based]

In contrast, the field-based frame of reference does not involve a deictic center; Ego and its subjective present is optional and irrelevant. Instead, it reflects a SEQUENCE AS POSITION ON A PATH metaphor and corresponds to the B-series time: What counts for this type of reference is the order of events within a sequence, as in (6): (6)

‘‘Monday comes before Tuesday.’’

[= (3)]

[field-based]

Recently, Moore (2011) further specified this account in various ways: by categorizing ME and the Ego-centered MT perspectives together as ‘‘Ego-perspective (path-configured) frames of reference’’, by now explicitly relating his terms to the A-series (= Ego-perspective) and B-series (= field-based), and by discussing possible relationships with the spatial FoRs in Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy (Table 5b). On the latter issue of mapping spatial FoRs to the temporal domain, however, he remains rather critical: While the field-based frame of reference is taken as including the absolute FoR, the Ego-perspective frame of reference is claimed to be without counterpart and, more specifically, to be explicitly not equivalent either to the relative or the intrinsic FoR (Moore, 2011). This revised account is also discernibly closer to the account described in the next section. 3.2. Reference-point (RP) metaphors (Núñez) A second attempt to go beyond temporal perspectives and to integrate them with referencing systems is the reference-point (RP) metaphors account proposed by Núñez and Sweetser (2006; and see Núñez, Motz, & Teuscher, 2006). In contrast to Moore (2004, 2011), who splits the MT perspective into two distinct categories, Ego-based versus field-based, and merges one of these (Ego-based) with the ME perspective as deictic, Núñez’ account classifies ME and MT as two sub-cases of what they call the ‘‘Ego-Reference-Point (Ego-RP) metaphor’’, because they consider both ME and MT as typically involving an Ego. The EgoRP metaphor is set apart from a ‘‘Time-Reference-Point (Time-RP) metaphor’’ that does not presuppose Ego (Table 5c). Examples like (5) and (7) are thus categorized as instances of Ego-RP metaphors because they make use of Ego (or rather its subjective now) as the reference point. Examples like (8) are categorized as instances of Time-RP metaphors because they depict sequences of events and use one of these events (here Tuesday) as the reference point. (7) (8)

‘‘June is still ahead [of me].’’ ‘‘Monday comes before Tuesday.’’

[Ego-RP] [= (6)]

[Time-RP]

In this sense, the Ego-RP metaphor directly corresponds to an A-series description, and the Time-RP metaphor to a B-Series description, even though this is not explicitly stated by Núñez and Sweetser (2006). The main difference between this account and the one proposed by Moore is thus related to how strictly each defines the scope of the ME and MT perspectives: as being restricted to deictic (A-series) descriptions, or as reaching further to include non-deictic (B-series) descriptions (see discussion above and Section 2.2.2). Núñez and Sweetser (2006) do not explicitly refer their account to any taxonomy of spatial FoRs either. What they do point out, though, is a correspondence between the Time-RP metaphor and Evans’ (2003) complex temporal

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Table 5 Schematic overview of the temporal accounts using frames of reference (FoR).

Note. The terms characteristic for each account are printed bold-faced; correspondence with relevant terms that are not explicated but can be inferred are printed grey and in square brackets; metaphors are in capital letters; and correspondence to Levinson’s (2003) FoRs are shaded. Further explanation is given in the text.

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sequence model; in addition, they characterize the temporal relationships in the Time-RP metaphor as ‘‘intrinsic’’ to the sequence (Núñez et al., 2006, Footnote 1), with earlier events being described as ‘‘in front of’’ later events. These two statements encourage us to (tentatively) classify the Time-RP metaphor as an instance of the intrinsic FoR. This would also be compatible with how they derive the intrinsic FRONT of G in the Time-RP metaphor, namely from the prototypical direction of motion (i.e., pastwards; Fig. 1b). In contrast, the Ego-RP metaphor, for which they assign Ego the decisive role, might be seen as corresponding to a relative FoR.

a sufficient precondition for ternary relations: If Ego serves as the ground entity G for the reference, the relation is binary (as explained in Section 2.2.3) and thus only affords an intrinsic FoR. A-series descriptions may therefore entail an intrinsic FoR as in (9) (9) ‘‘I have a fun afternoon in front of me.’’ [intrinsic] (binary, with F = afternoon and G = me/Ego), or a relative FoR as in (10) (10)

3.3. Temporal framework models (Kranjec) Following on from this classification, Kranjec (2006) proposes a temporal framework models account, with which he tries to integrate the reference point metaphors with the A- and B-series of time and with all three spatial FoRs from Levinson’s (2003) account. His taxonomy encompasses a deictic temporal framework (which comes close to what Levinson labels ‘‘relative’’), an intrinsic, and an extrinsic framework or ‘‘absolute’’ FoR in Levinson’s terminology (in more recent work, the intrinsic and extrinsic temporal framework were relabeled as ‘‘linked’’ and ‘‘path’’, respectively; see Kranjec & McDonough, 2011). The deictic temporal framework covers the A-series type of events, subsumes the ME and MT perspectives, and is thus equivalent to the Ego-RP metaphor proposed by Núñez and Sweetser (2006). The classical non-deictic cases (B-series), which basically rely on the earlier/later relation within temporal sequences, are captured in his account by the intrinsic temporal framework, akin to Núñez’ Time-RP metaphor. Finally, the one framework that is newly considered here, the extrinsic temporal framework, is based on the notion of ‘‘time itself’’ (referred to as the ‘‘matrix sense’’ of time by Evans, 2003). According to this notion, time is ‘‘a backdrop, or something understood to move forward, independent of particular events embedded within it’’ (Kranjec, 2006, p. 450), and its direction eventually affords assignment of FRONT to the future (Table 5d). 3.4. Temporal frames of reference (Zinken) Similar to the previous account, Zinken (2010) takes the A-/B-series conception as his starting point and tries to integrate it with Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy of spatial FoRs. He equates an A-series classification with Moore’s Ego-based frame and Núñez’ Ego-RP metaphor. Both temporal perspectives, ME and MT, are considered to be subcases of this category (which reveals the stricter reading of the temporal perspectives; Section 2.2.2). Conversely, a B-series classification is equated with Moore’s field-based frame and Núñez’ time-RP metaphor, except that this does not entail the MT perspective (Table 5e). The integration with spatial FoRs is based on whether the relations involved are binary or ternary (Fig. 2) and on an analysis of how FRONT is assigned in each of these cases. A-series time always involves an Ego, and is thus a necessary precondition for ternary relations (which are a necessary precondition for the relative FoR). However, it is not

‘‘the day after tomorrow’’ (ternary, with F = the day, G = tomorrow, and V = today/Ego’s now).

[relative]

As Ego is constitutive of A-series descriptions, Ego’s looking direction is taken as the source for assigning FRONT to the future. This holds both for the intrinsic example in (9) and the relative example in (10); however, in the latter case, FRONT is constrained to that part of Ego’s future which is also in G’s past (which is why the day after tomorrow, and thus in G’s future, is also in G’s back). In B-series time, Ego is irrelevant; therefore, both an intrinsic and an absolute FoR are, in principle, possible. However, in contrast to binary relations in A-series time, where the intrinsic FoR is warranted by Ego and its intrinsic FRONT, its adoption in this context requires an additional assumption. To endow a ground event G with an intrinsic FRONT, Zinken argues, events need to be regarded as one ‘‘following’’ the other, as in (11): (11)

‘‘One day comes after the other.’’

[intrinsic]

The direction of movement can thus be used to assign to the earlier or anterior event (Zinken, 2010; and see Fillmore, 1971). The absolute FoR, on the other hand, requires that the origo of the coordinate system is not located in the ground entity G, but in the surrounding field. According to Zinken (2010), temporal intervals (such as days or weeks) can be understood as such bounded entities or ‘fields’, with the beginning of the interval (in the past) corresponding to the field’s FRONT, and with earlier events as being closer to this FRONT. For this very reason, he classifies (12)—different from (11)—as an example of an absolute FoR: FRONT—here:

(12)

‘‘Wednesday is after Tuesday.’’

[absolute]

In a more recent paper (Sinha et al., 2011), Zinken’s account has been somewhat modified. Here, the terms absolute, intrinsic, and relative are no longer used; instead, ME and MT are classified as ‘‘Ego-relative temporal motion constructions’’, and sequence-based ones as ‘‘positional time constructions’’, which is equated with Moore’s (2011) field-based temporal FoR and McTaggart’s (1908) B-series (Table 5e0 ). It is unclear whether this shift in terminology is intended as a conceptual advancement. However, as Zinken himself argued in his earlier paper, such a bipartite classification would be less powerful than his original tripartite FoR system.

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3.5. Reference frames of space and time (Tenbrink) For her account, which aims to provide a cross-domain framework, Tenbrink (2011) directly builds on Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy and expands it by adding dynamic relations to the static ones, and by transferring the resulting system from space to time. Her reference frames are modeled along the following lines: (a) intrinsic, relative, and absolute concepts (or none of these), (b) static versus dynamic situations, and (c) external versus internal relationships between entities (in space only). Based on these distinctions, she describes 23 different reference frames for space and 10 for time. Leaving aside the external/ internal distinction, we will focus in this review on her absolute, intrinsic, and relative FoR for static situations, but will also, where necessary, pay special attention to dynamic situations. The transfer of Tenbrink’s spatial taxonomy to time additionally makes use of the A- and B-series and their mapping onto ME and MT perspectives. Following Galton (2011), she describes time as having an ‘‘inbuilt asymmetry’’, which, however, can be conceived of in two contrasting ways: as a vector from past to future (associated with the deictic A-series), and as a vector based on anteriority/posteriority in sequences (associated with the non-deictic B-series), which points towards earlier times (Table 5f). In line with Moore (2006, 2011), the B-series in her account corresponds to the Ego-free MT and thus to a field-based frame of reference; and the anteriority/posteriority relation within sequences of events is seen as warranting its classification as absolute FoR (it cannot be intrinsic as events do not have an intrinsic FRONT according to Tenbrink, 2011). Her treatment of the A-series, however, diverges from Moore (2004, 2011) insofar as she does not explicitly account for Ego-centered MT as instance of reference frames. Instead, she considers a distinction of static versus dynamic situations as more important. The static A-series situations in her account all have a binary structure, with G = Ego (as in (13)), thus affording an intrinsic FoR (see also Zinken, 2010). (13)

‘‘Good times lie before me.’’

[intrinsic]

FRONT is assigned in line with Ego’s looking direction and thus typically to the future. According to Tenbrink (2011), ternary relations do not exist in temporal language for static situations, and therefore no relative FoR exists either. In contrast, the dynamic situations in her account afford more than one FoR. Respective cases include binary relations as in (14), which are classified as intrinsic (again with G = Ego), and ternary relations as in (15).

(14) (15)

‘‘I’m going forward in time.’’ ‘‘Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days.’’

[intrinsic]

At least in English, example (15) constitutes an ambiguous case, in which the meeting may be understood as having been moved towards Friday (futurewards) or Monday (pastwards). Both readings are classified by Tenbrink (2011) as being based on a relative FoR: the futurewards reading as resulting from an ME perspective and the

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pastwards reading as resulting from an MT perspective. From the ME perspective, assignment of FRONT is derived from Ego’s moving direction into the future. From the complementary MT perspective, the event is seen as being moved into Ego’s FRONT area. The same reading (pastwards to Monday) could also arise from an absolute FoR, according to which the meeting has been simply moved towards earlier times, regardless of how it is related to Ego’s now. 3.6. Temporal frames of reference, t-FoR (Bender, Beller, and Bennardo) In contrast to most other accounts, Bender and colleagues (Bender et al., 2005, 2010, 2012; Rothe-Wulf et al., 2014; and see Table 5g) do not take the A-/B-series distinction as their starting point, but rely entirely on the design principles laid out for frames of reference by Levinson (Section 2.2.3). Based on these principles, they propose a set of possible FoRs (not necessarily attested to by examples from English) that can be used to explore the extent of diversity in temporal references. They define an absolute t-FoR as one that derives its orientation from the superordinate field outside figure, ground, and observer. As space itself is the superordinate field in the spatial domain, so is time in the temporal domain; and the asymmetry of time (i.e., its directionality) can be recruited for assigning orientation to this field: FRONT is where the arrow of time is pointing to, namely (typically) towards the future. Events ‘‘in front of’’ other events or ‘‘moved forward’’ from their previous position would thus be further in the future. An intrinsic FoR derives its orientation from the ground entity G; and the asymmetry of events (with a beginning and an end) can be recruited for providing these entities with orientation: FRONT is assigned to that part of time pertinent to the beginning of event G. Events ‘‘in front of’’ other events or ‘‘moved forward’’ from their previous position would thus be in the past of the original date. Importantly, in the t-FoR account, this also holds if Ego happens to coincide with G, as what counts here as G in time is a temporal entity such as subjective present, and not Ego’s looking direction. A relative FoR, finally, requires a ternary relation between figure F, ground G, and observer V. How F is localized in reference to G depends on V’s subjective viewpoint, and this viewpoint can change relative to the constellation of F and G (e.g., by simply ‘moving’ through time). Crucially, it emerges as either one of two different (and in fact opposed) variants (Fig. 2): In the reflection variant, the primary coordinate system originating in V is transferred into G by reflection and thus leads to the assignment of FRONT to the time between G and V (i.e., nearer to V), whereas in the translation variant, the primary coordinate system is transferred into G by translation, thus leading to the assignment of FRONT to the time beyond G (i.e., further away from V). In either case, events are localized symmetrically in one’s past and future, and thus with diverging FRONTs and BACKs. Such a relative-reflective (or ‘‘egocentric’’) pattern is nicely demonstrated, for instance, in the French terms for greatgrandchildren and great-grandparents, which are all suffixed by arrière, ‘‘behind’’ (Radden, 2004).

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In the t-FoR account, A-series and B-series descriptions may reflect certain FoRs more or less closely (e.g., a B-series description of sequenced events invites an intrinsic FoR), but are not seen as logically related. In particular, A-series descriptions do not entail a relative FoR per se. A genuine relative FoR presupposes that the introduction of the subjective viewpoint (V) of an observer (which has to be distinct from G) makes a difference for referencing; and this is not the case for most A-series descriptions. For instance, a sentence like (16) (16)

‘‘Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days.’’

[= (15)]

could still be understood according to the intrinsic FoR in that ‘‘forward’’ is interpreted as being towards earlier times, or according to the absolute FoR in that ‘‘forward’’ is interpreted as being simply towards the future. Likewise, the ME and MT perspective in the more general reading (Section 2.2.2) largely reflect different temporal FoRs, with ME reflecting the futurewards orientation aligned to the arrow of time (absolute FoR) and MT reflecting the pastwards orientation, towards the beginning of time (intrinsic FoR). However, they do not necessarily always correlate with them: From both perspectives, future is where the arrow of time is pointing to (absolute), the beginning of events occurs earlier than their endings (intrinsic), and Ego and future are approaching each other (relative). The assignment of FRONT, arguably the hallmark of a frame of reference, is not fully affected by the adoption of a temporal perspective (except for ambiguous cases like (16), the reading of which may indeed be primed by movement; see Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002). 3.7. Further accounts For the sake of completeness, two more accounts will be briefly presented despite the fact that they are not yet widely disseminated: the temporal reference frames account by Yu (2012), and the route versus survey perspectives account by Jamalian and Tversky (2012). 3.7.1. Temporal reference frames (Yu) In order to resolve the controversy regarding whether, in Chinese, Ego is conceived of as facing toward the future or the past, Yu (2012) proposes two distinctions. The first

distinction concerns the reference point RP, which in other taxonomies (and in this review) is denominated as ground entity G. Following Moore (2011) and Núñez and Sweetser (2006), the two categories are labeled Ego-RP and Time-RP (Yu, 2012). The second—and novel—distinction concerns the referent R (or figure entity F), with time-referent (Time-R) and human-referent (Human-R) as the two categories relevant for Chinese (Yu, 2012; and see Table 6). The latter category consists of human sequences (either as ‘‘deictic human frame’’ or ‘‘sequential human frame’’), which are analogous to event sequences and thus map onto an earlier/later relation, with older people and generations ‘‘in front of’’ the sequence and/or Ego. The A-/B-series distinction is mentioned in passing as being related (and presumably overlapping with the RP distinction). ME and MT are mainly used for assigning FRONT to temporal entities and/or relations. Yu’s account largely remains silent regarding a possible correspondence with (spatial) FoRs, leaning more towards Talmy’s (2000) than Levinson’s (2003) taxonomy, specifically when it comes to assigning FRONT in queue-like compositions such as event sequences. Such compositions are seen as ‘‘encompassive secondary reference objects’’ (Talmy, 2000; and see Moore, 2011). Their FRONT is derived from alignment and/or moving direction and overrides the (possible) orientation of single entities. In contrast to many other scholars, but in line with Bender and colleagues and partly Zinken (2010), this account also grants an intrinsic FRONT to times and events (Yu, 2012). 3.7.2. Route perspective versus survey perspective (Jamalian and Tversky) In contrast to the aforementioned account that relates to spatial FoRs only in passing, the account proposed by Jamalian and Tversky (2012) is not as elaborate with regard to temporal concepts as the previous ones. Coming from the research tradition in mental maps and spatial navigation, these authors focus on the distinction between route perspective versus survey perspective, which they equate with an intrinsic or egocentric FoR and an absolute FoR, respectively. The route perspective in space is considered to be analogous to both the ME and MT perspective in time, taken from an embedded viewpoint and with Ego as the reference point. In contrast, the survey perspective on space is considered to be analogous to a calendar view on time, taken from an external viewpoint and with dates

Table 6 The four temporal reference frames distinguished by Yu (2012).

Note. A-series and B-series labels were added here for easier comparison.

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or events as the reference points (see also Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; Zinken, 2010). 4. Comparison of accounts As we have seen above, most accounts make use of the same set of conceptual components for construing temporal FoRs (which is partly obscured by idiosyncratic labeling), but combine them in distinct ways. As one consequence, each of the accounts proposed so far differs in substantial ways from any other account. In this section, we attempt to analyze similarities and differences between the accounts by addressing the following questions: (1) How are the conceptual sources related to each other for the construal of temporal FoRs? (2) On which principles is FoR construal based, and how is FRONT assignment realized in this process? And (3) what types of relations or referencing patterns are predicted from each of these taxonomies? In closing this section, we also explore (4) the potential for integrating these accounts. 4.1. Relations between conceptual sources The conceptual sources to be considered here encompass A- and B-series, the Moving Ego (ME) and Moving Time (MT) perspective, and up to four frames of reference (FoRs). 4.1.1. Relations between A-/B-series and temporal FoRs Almost all of the accounts presented here (except for the one by Bender et al., 2010) take deixis, in any one of its conceptual variants (e.g., A-/B-series, Ego-/field-based, Ego/ time reference point), as their starting point. In other words, the basic distinction from which most taxonomies unfold is the distinction between linguistic expressions that do or do not entail a deictic center: Ego, or rather Ego’s present. This is certainly attributable to the fact that most of these accounts originate from linguistics, and it accommodates the relevance of deixis, particularly for the relative FoR, which does indeed require the viewpoint V of an observer. Taking deictic versus non-deictic expressions as the prime distinction, however, may obscure the fact that the relations between the A-/B-series classification on the one hand and a FoR-based classification on the other are more complex (Section 2.2.2; and see Levinson, 2003; Moore, 2011). Binary relations in which Ego (or V) serves as the primary reference point (= ground G), such as (9) or (13) above, attest to this complexity as much as a ternary example like (15). The binary relations with G = V do not qualify as examples of a relative FoR (Tenbrink, 2011; Zinken, 2010), whereas a ternary example like (15), despite clearly qualifying as an A-series description, could also be interpreted in line with an absolute FoR (Bender et al., 2010; Tenbrink, 2011). Undoubtedly, however, the A-/B-series distinction helps to avoid confusion between past and future on the one hand and earlier and later on the other. 4.1.2. Relations between ME/MT perspectives and A-/B-series Whereas A- and B-series are incommensurable with each other, ME and MT provide complementary perspectives on

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the exact same scene. As detailed in Section 2.2.2, this simple fact implies that the two distinctions address different dimensions of temporal descriptions and, as a consequence, cannot be mapped onto each other in any straightforward manner. Some accounts (e.g., Kranjec, 2006; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; Zinken, 2010) conceptualize both ME and MT as involving a deictic center (Ego), as was intended in the original version (Section 2.2.2), and therefore map them onto the A-series (Table 5). Other accounts (notably Moore, 2004, 2011; and see also Tenbrink, 2011) extend the notion of MT by also including non-deictic cases, which they then map onto the B-series. As argued by Bender et al. (2010), such an extension presupposes a more general view on temporal moving perspectives, namely as a perspective on time as moving not only towards Ego but towards temporal entities and events more generally. Since ME and MT are figure/ground reversals of each other, this must entail the possibility of the reversed perspective: a non-deictic ME perspective according to which not only Ego, but temporal entities and events more generally are (figuratively) moving through time (in this case, of course, the perspective should be labeled ‘‘moving event’’ or ‘‘moving entity’’, rather than ‘‘moving Ego’’). In (16), for instance, the meeting moves towards the future; the same is possible (in both directions) for other events such as floating holidays and vacations. As proposed in the account by Bender, Beller, and Bennardo (2010; and see Table 4 above), the ME/MT distinction would thus fully intersect the A-/B-series distinction, at least in theory. Whether this theoretical claim can be corroborated by empirical evidence remains to be seen. 4.1.3. Relations between ME/MT perspectives and temporal FoRs Those accounts that conceptualize ME and MT in the stricter sense as involving a deictic center also tend to equate both perspectives with a relative FoR (Kranjec, 2006; and by inference perhaps Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). The same holds for Zinken’s (2010) account, albeit with the relative FoR being restricted to ternary relations. Accounts that also admit non-deictic MT cases (Moore, 2004, 2011; Tenbrink, 2011) match them to an absolute FoR (Table 5). The account by Bender et al. (2010) diverges from all of these accounts in various ways. Due to diverging design principles, it proposes cases that do or do not involve Ego for both the ME and MT perspective, and it refuses to conflate the two complementary perspectives under one FoR. As a consequence, non-deictic MT is seen as being compatible with an intrinsic FoR, and non-deictic ME as being compatible with an absolute FoR. In contrast, the two variants of the relative FoR do not comply, in this account, with any general moving perspective. 4.1.4. Distinction between static and dynamic situations Tenbrink (2011) argues that a comprehensive taxonomy of temporal FoRs should include the distinction between static and dynamic situations (Section 3.5), and as we will see from the empirical data compiled below, this may indeed be important in some cases. With regard to her clas-

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Table 7 Assignment of FRONT depending on the adopted t-FoR, together with the principles on which this is based, in each of the accounts; further explanation is given in the text.

sification of FoRs, however, it only has a bearing on her conceptualization of relative FoRs, which are claimed to exist in dynamic but not static situations. Why this should be valid is an interesting question in itself (for counter-examples, see Levinson & Majid, 2013; Radden, 2004; Shinohara & Pardeshi, 2011; Zinken, 2010), but in either case, this restriction entitles us to collapse our review across static and dynamic situations for all other FoRs. 4.2. Principles of FoR construal and

FRONT

assignment

As explained in Section 2.2.3, a frame of reference (FoR) is a coordinate system required to establish the position of a figure F in reference to a ground G from a given perspective (which may or may not be an observer V). The FoRs differ essentially in terms of where this coordinate system originates and how it is oriented. The system’s origo may be in the superordinate field (in the case of the absolute FoR), in G (intrinsic), or in V (relative) and is used to establish its orientation. With regard to these design principles, spatial frames of reference (s-FoRs) do not differ from temporal frames of reference (t-FoRs).3 4.2.1. Absolute t-FoR The construal of an absolute FoR requires an oriented superordinate field outside F, G, and V. In the spatial domain, this field is space, and in the temporal domain, by analogy, it is time. But while the relevance of such an oriented field is 3 It should be noted, though, that not all accounts reviewed here are based on these principles (see specifically Moore, 2011).

undisputed, there is no consensus on where this orientation may come from. In the accounts reviewed here, at least three different principles can be identified for how orientation of the temporal field is conceptualized (see Table 7). In line with causal relations and the change from perception to memory, the arrow of time as conceptualized by most physicists and psychologists points towards the future (Section 2.1.3). This notion is enlisted by Kranjec (2006) and Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010) to identify the orientation of the field as futurewards. In at least two other accounts (Tenbrink, 2011; and, albeit with reservations, Moore, 2011), this same arrow of time is regarded as emerging from the viewpoint of Ego, who happens to be aligned to the future, thus connecting it to an intrinsic FoR. For construing an absolute FoR, these accounts take instead the earlier/later (anteriority/posteriority) relation, inherent in the sequence of events (akin to people in a queue), as the source from which they derive the orientation of the field. According to these accounts, the absolute field is therefore oriented pastwards or, more precisely, towards earlier events.4 Finally, Zinken (2010) also considers the absolute field as being oriented towards earlier 4 The same seems to hold for Jamalian and Tversky (2012), who equate the absolute FoR with a calendar view on time, with dates or events as the reference points and ‘‘earlier/later’’ as the terms of reference. However, this account leaves open whether the field is considered to be oriented towards earlier or later events. Yu (2012) does not specify his account with regard to a FoR taxonomy, but as he leans on Talmy’s (2000) treatment of queue-like compositions in a way similar to Moore (2011), we categorize him into this group by analogy. Crucially, in his account, not only sequences of events are referenced absolutely, but also sequences of human generations.

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times, but for a different reason. In his account, the field, in which single events are embedded, consists of larger temporal entities—intervals like days, weeks, months, or years. The beginning of these intervals is assumed to be their FRONT, and this has always taken place in the past of the embedded events. 4.2.2. Intrinsic t-FoR The intrinsic FoR usually attracts little dispute, even with regard to denomination. For it to be enacted, the ground object G (or reference point) that serves as origo of the system needs to have an orientation assigned to it. Amazingly, however, in the temporal domain, little consensus can be observed across the different accounts regarding what would count as an intrinsic orientation— or whether G, if it is an event, may have one at all (see Table 7). Tenbrink (2011), for instance, claims that this is impossible (and see Zinken, 2010). For this very reason, the two accounts only consider cases in which the observer V coincides with the ground (G = Ego) as examples of an intrinsic FoR. Derived from the assumed looking or moving direction of Ego (prevailingly futurewards), FRONT is assigned to the future5 (in Zinken’s account only for A-series descriptions). In contrast, three accounts propose the opposite assignment of FRONT to earlier times, although for different reasons: Zinken (2010, for B-series phrases) and Kranjec (2006)—as well as, perhaps, Núñez and Sweetser (2006)— due to the metaphorical moving direction of G, derived from the earlier/later relation in event sequences; and Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010) due to what they hold to be an intrinsic FRONT of events (the latter assumption is also shared by Yu, 2012). 4.2.3. Relative t-FoR To an even greater extent than the intrinsic FoR, the relative FoR seems to open up a wide field for diverging perspectives and positions. Relative FoRs require a ternary relation, in which Ego (or V) cannot serve as the primary reference point (or G). But whether they exist in the domain of time, and, if so, in how many variants, remains disputed (see Table 7). A relative temporal FoR is claimed not to exist at all by Moore (2011) and not to exist for static situations by Tenbrink (2011). Other accounts do admit its existence. Zinken (2010), for instance, defines a relative FoR as entailing the assignment of FRONT to the future of Ego—due to its looking direction—but past of or earlier than G (i.e., the interval between Ego and G). Kranjec (2006) and even Tenbrink (2011, for dynamic situations) also propose a relative FoR, but one that implies two diverging assignments of FRONT: towards the future or later times from an ME perspective, and towards the past or earlier times from an MT perspective (see also Jamalian & Tversky, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010), finally, propose two relative FoRs, a reflection and a translation one—each 5 Arguably, this may also be how one can categorize Yu’s (2012) deictic time frame, which combines Ego-RP with Time-R (thus corresponding to the classical A-series) and is oriented towards the future.

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with a distinct and unambiguous assignment pattern: nearer to Ego for the reflection, and further away from Ego for the translation variant. This conception is in line with Galton’s (2011) notion of radial half-axes, and it also conforms with early theoretical considerations put forward by Traugott (1975, 1978), who defined tense, in its simplest form, as the distinction between proximal and distal relations, and thus as symmetrical to the deictic center. 4.3. Referencing patterns As a consequence of the different conceptualizations and principles for assigning FRONT, the accounts reviewed here also make qualitatively distinct predictions with regard to the number and type of the resultant referencing patterns (see Table 8). 4.3.1. Two patterns The early accounts of A-series versus B-series (following McTaggart, 1908) as well as the approaches that build on the ME versus MT perspective on time (Clark, 1973; Fillmore, 1971; and see, e.g., Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002; Gentner et al., 2002; McGlone & Harding, 1998) basically distinguish two patterns of assigning FRONT, namely either futurewards (A-series, ME perspective) or pastwards/ towards earlier events (B-series, MT perspective). This pattern is reflected in the accounts of Moore (2004, 2011), Núñez and Sweetser (2006), and Kranjec (2006)—and this despite the fact that Moore splits MT into an ego-centered and a field-based version, and Kranjec even distinguishes four different cases (extrinsic, intrinsic, and deictic in an ME versus MT version). 4.3.2. Three patterns Zinken (2010) and Tenbrink (2011) predict three different patterns: a simple pattern each for a futurewards assignment (for A-series, with Ego = G) and a pastwards assignment (for B-series) as well as a more complex pattern of assigning FRONT to the space between Ego and a ground entity (which is in the future of Ego). In Zinken’s (2010) account, this occurs for all cases of A-series, in which Ego is not conflated with G. In Tenbrink’s (2011) account, it occurs for dynamic situations only, and only according to one reading of her example (16), in which the entity to be moved is perceived as approaching. While these accounts offer a third pattern insofar as they qualify the pastwards movement by fixing it to the future of Ego, they remain silent on the question of what happens to this pattern in Ego’s past. It is thus not clear whether assigning FRONT to the past of G (but the future of Ego) is qualitatively different from a more general assignment of FRONT to the past and thus from a broader MT perspective, regardless of Ego’s position. 4.3.3. Four patterns In contrast, the account by Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010) explicitly distinguishes the set of general movements (pastwards vs. futurewards) from a set of radial movements (towards Ego/now vs. awaywards from Ego/now, both in past and future). This subsumes the

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FRONT

assignment and/or forward movement; explanation is given in the text.

half-linear or half-radial patterns acknowledged by Zinken (2010) and Tenbrink (2011). 4.4. Potential for integration As is apparent from the above overview, conceptualizations differ dramatically for all of the FoRs, and for none is there convergence among more than half of the accounts. None of the accounts agrees completely with any of the other accounts across all FoRs. And even where two accounts propose the same type of FRONT assignment, this may be for quite different reasons. Does this situation leave any leeway for us to decide objectively, which of the principles adopted for the construal of the t-FoRs is more sensible than the others? At first glance, this seems to be unlikely. For instance, the orientation of the temporal field required for the absolute FoR can be derived from the arrow of time, which points towards the future, but it can also be derived from an extensive temporal interval that began in the past, in ‘‘the beginning of all time’’. This is further complicated by the fact that, for some speech communities like Aymara (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), the future is apparently con-

ceived of as being in one’s back, and the past as in front. However, this apparent arbitrariness in how such a crucial question could be addressed in fact helps to highlight a need for further conceptual clarifications related to a spatio-temporal taxonomy of FoRs. In order to settle the theoretical disputes, we propose a taxonomy entirely based on abstract design principles. FoR construal according to this taxonomy depends on the number of entities for which the relation has to be established (binary or ternary) and on the origo of the coordinate system (in the superordinate field, the ground entity G, or the observer’s viewpoint V). While this is largely consensual across the accounts reviewed here, the current proposal differs from these accounts in how it treats linguistic examples: For an intrinsic FoR to be diagnosed, it cannot be decisive whether, for instance, Wednesday’s meeting is moved forward into the past, but whether the alignment of FORWARD with past is derived from the ground (Wednesday), rather than from the field (time in general) or the observer’s viewpoint (now). Like its counterpart in space, this taxonomy constitutes a tool for assessing a broad range of possible references in time. However, it remains abstract insofar as it contains at

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least one free parameter, namely the principle according to which orientation is assigned to the entity that serves as origo for the coordinate system—in each of the FoRs under scrutiny here, albeit to varying degrees. How orientation is concretely assigned depends almost entirely on cultural conventions and may thus vary across and perhaps even within speech communities. If two speakers diverge in how they assign orientation to origo, an apparently identical expression would be generated by diverging FoRs, whereas adoption of the same FoR would generate diverging expressions. More specifically, the alignment of FORWARD with past could be indicative of an absolute FoR (if time is seen as having its beginning in the past), or of an intrinsic FoR (if events are seen as being oriented by their beginning, or if events are seen as moving into the past). In not presupposing a specific alignment, this account differs substantially from all accounts reviewed above, and even from the initial t-FoR taxonomy. While Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010) acknowledged such a free parameter to be fixed by cultural convention in the case of the absolute FoR, they did not acknowledge it for the intrinsic FoR, which they simply equated with pastward alignment.6 Consequently, the original t-FoR taxonomy fell short of achieving a clear conceptual separation of the design principles on the one hand and their (culturespecific) instantiation on the other. This conceptual separation, however, is crucial for tighter integration of the accounts reviewed above. As indicated in Table 7, most of these accounts already agree on the relevance of the design principles for FoR construal. This convergence, however, is partly blurred by four sources of confusion, three of which can be resolved on theoretical grounds. The first source for blurring is the conceptualization of the relative FoR, which has given rise to the most controversy—from claims that it does not exist at all, to suggestions of one FoR or even two variants of it. This controversy fizzles out if some of the somewhat underspecified assumptions regarding the relative FoR are elaborated further. Three of the four accounts that do propose relative FoRs distinguish two different cases that entail diverging FRONT assignments, namely both to future and past (Table 7). This in itself is unsatisfactory: The purpose of adopting a FoR is to locate F in reference to G. Consequently, each FoR should give a non-ambiguous search space for F. While this does not imply that relations can be described by only one FoR, it does imply that each FoR should give only one relation of F to G. Assuming two distinct variants of the relative t-FoR (akin to the variants of the relative FoR in space, as described in Section 2.2.3) solves this problem: The reflection variant of the relative FoR could encompass the MT cases in the accounts of 6 In the case of the relative FoR, the free parameter to be fixed by cultural conventions defines how the primary coordinate system with origo X in V is transferred into G. As described in Section 2.2.3, this can be done by rotation, reflection, or translation, thus giving rise to three variants, which differ in how the secondary coordinate system (anchored in G = X2) is oriented. The degree to which speakers may differ in this regard, has been documented especially for the spatial domain (e.g., Beller et al., 2014; Bender et al., 2012; Bennardo, 2000; Bennardo, 2009; Hill, 1982) and will be discussed for the temporal domain in Section 7.3.1.

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Núñez and Sweetser (2006), Kranjec (2006), and Tenbrink (2011), with the additional specification that FRONT is assigned not simply to the past, but to the past of G within the future of Ego (i.e., to the interval between Ego/V and G); and the translation variant could encompass the ME cases in these same accounts, with the additional specification that FRONT is assigned not simply to the future, but to the future of both G and Ego. A second source for blurring is the question of whether Ego’s assumed looking or moving direction (into the future) may serve to assign FRONT in any of the FoRs. As detailed in Section 4.2.2, some accounts (Tenbrink, 2011; Zinken, 2010) consider binary relations with Ego (V) = G as the only cases in which an intrinsic FoR can be adopted. In these cases, Ego’s looking direction is seen as providing the basis for FRONT assignment. ‘‘Ego’’ in time, however, is only used figuratively as person; in actual fact it is defined as an event or time point (i.e., Ego’s subjective present), for which looking direction does not make sense. Rather, Ego’s looking direction reflects the general view of where time ‘flows’ to, and may thus be used as an indicator for how orientation of the absolute field is defined in this speech community (see also Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Yu, 2012). This concern is related to the third source for blurring, namely the debate on whether temporal entities and/or the superordinate field can be regarded as oriented at all. As mentioned above, some accounts (including Zinken, 2010) claim that events do not have an intrinsic orientation. If, however, time in general, as well as time intervals like weeks or days more specifically, may be seen as directed, thus providing orientation to the field in an absolute sense (Zinken, 2010; and see Yu, 2012), any event serving as ground G for the intrinsic FoR—by virtue of having a beginning in the exact same way—should also be seen as directed. This is what actually allows the sequence of events in B-series descriptions to be depicted by a vector pointing towards earlier times. The final source for blurring is the disagreement among accounts on what provides the basis for FRONT assignment in binary temporal relations, with some scholars recruiting the same principle (e.g., the sequence of events) for justifying an absolute FoR that others use to justify an intrinsic FoR. This disagreement cannot be resolved on theoretical grounds. As we argued above, the principle according to which orientation is assigned to the origo for the coordinate system is largely based on conventions. Whether and how speakers assign FRONT to time and temporal entities such as events can only be assessed empirically. The second part of this review therefore scrutinizes the available empirical data. Based on this analysis, the potential for a more coherent theoretical integration will then be discussed anew. To summarize, while the ways in which each account assigns FRONT in each of the temporal FoRs currently paint a rather confusing picture, it would indeed be possible to achieve more consensus and coherence: by taking the design principles for FoR construal as the starting point, by acknowledging the radial patterns involved in the relative FoR, by using Ego’s alignment with time (its ‘‘looking direction’’) as an indicator of how field orientation is perceived, and by establishing the (culture-specific) princi-

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ples for FRONT assignment in the intrinsic and absolute FoR on empirical rather than theoretical grounds. One of the main differences between accounts simply arises from their disciplinary background and traditions. Most of them, originating in linguistics, present natural language examples that are then analyzed and sorted into categories. To various degrees, these categories are modeled after the A-/B-series distinction, the ME/MT-perspectives on time, some reference point metaphors, or other related conceptual sources. Another approach, which is more closely related to representational accounts in anthropology, psychology or cognitive science, begins by covering the space of conceivable reference patterns and derives from those the design principles for frames of reference, with the purpose of being broad enough to capture a potentially large degree of cross-linguistic variability. The resultant grid overlaps substantially with the categories arising from the linguistic approach, but (presently) also contains empty cells. For instance, apart from the generational terms reported by Radden (2004), no conclusive evidence has yet been provided for a relative-reflective reference pattern in the temporal domain (contrary to its pervasiveness in space). The crucial question, then, is whether languages can be found that may provide examples for the empty cells. Used in this way, such a grid equips us with a powerful tool to discover new and interesting phenomena. If, however, these cells remain empty, we will still have gained valuable information with regard to cognitive constraints on temporal referencing. 5. Empirical investigations: methods and tasks Regardless of how thoroughly scholars may have designed their cross-domain taxonomies for frames of reference, the question of whether and how people really do transfer spatial conceptualizations into the domain of time—or are otherwise affected by spatial cues when engaging in temporal reasoning—can only be answered through empirical investigations. For the following overview, some thirty studies were scrutinized, which differ with regard to the theoretical stance they took, the methods they adopted, and the findings they obtained. To facilitate comparison, we will first describe in necessary detail their main methods, before presenting and discussing their findings (Sections 6 and Section 7). The range of widely different tasks can be sorted into the following types: (1) language elicitation, typically combined with some sort of priming, (2) analysis of bodily expressions such as gesture and postural sway, (3) elicitation of spatial layouts on which temporal relations are mapped, and (4) implicit tasks that use a reaction time paradigm with congruency priming. 5.1. Language elicitation tasks Generally, elicitation tasks present some kind of (linguistic or non-linguistic) stimuli and ask participants to provide a linguistic description or response. This is the case in the classic reference tasks where arrangements of objects have to be described (e.g., Pederson et al., 1998; Senft, 1995), either by way of free answers or instructions

for another person, or by selecting from a set of given options. The descriptions are then analyzed in terms of which FoRs they are based on. This type of task can easily be transferred to the temporal domain. 5.1.1. Elicitation: the Wednesday’s meeting task The classical elicitation paradigm in the temporal domain revolves around moving an event (McGlone & Harding, 1998): Participants are informed that ‘‘The meeting originally scheduled for next Wednesday has been moved forward two days.’’ When asked for the day on which the meeting will now take place, two answer options are provided (Monday and Friday), from which participants can choose. The question is ambiguous in that roughly half of US participants tend to choose Monday and the other half Friday. The former choice is considered to be consistent with an MT perspective and the latter with an ME perspective. If only two perspectives are to be distinguished, one question is sufficient. If, however, more possible perspectives are at stake, the original question with the event located in the future needs to be supplemented by a version in which the event is located in the past (Bender et al., 2005; Núñez et al., 2006). According to the reference-point (RP) metaphors account (Núñez et al., 2006), the past version forces participants to choose between an interpretation either relative to Ego’s front (leading to a futurewards movement) or relative to the front of the sequence (leading to an earlier-movement). According to the t-FoR account (Bender et al., 2005, 2010, 2012; RotheWulf et al., 2014), only the simultaneous consideration of a past and a future reference discriminates between all possible FoRs. In either case, however, we have no way of detecting mistakes which people may make in responding: Every single combination of responses produces a sensible pattern. This is generally true regarding all previous research in this field, but it becomes more salient when the correct diagnosis of specific FoRs is at stake. To address this concern, more than one pair of questions should be used, which enables one to assess intra-individual consistency in addition to FoR choice. While detecting inconsistent answers will not reveal whether participants made a mistake or simply changed their minds, consistent answers may be interpreted as support for the assumption that a specific FoR has indeed be adopted. 5.1.2. Linguistic priming (of the ME and MT perspective) Typically, the Wednesday’s meeting question is embedded in some sort of experimental context. In the original study by McGlone and Harding (1998; and see Gentner et al., 2002), this consisted of a list of similarly structured, but non-ambiguous temporal sentences like: ‘‘We passed the deadline two days ago’’. When the context consistently suggested an ME perspective, participants preferred the Friday response twice as often as the Monday response, whereas this pattern switched when the context suggested the MT perspective. The results are generally taken as evidence for the psychological reality of the ME and MT perspective: They prove that taking either of these temporal

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moving perspectives affects the way in which people interpret an ambiguous temporal phrase. Moving on from there, Boroditsky and her colleagues crossed the ‘space–time barrier’ demonstrating that priming spatial perspectives may have similar effects. The primes they used consist of spatial scenarios including a picture and a sentence description, with the scenarios either depicting a moving observer or a moving object (Boroditsky, 2000), or involve imagined and real motion (Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002). 5.1.3. Visual priming (of additional perspectives and/or frames of reference) In a similar vein, the Wednesday’s meeting question can be used to explore the psychological reality of other temporal concepts or metaphors which are claimed to be also used to process temporal information. Núñez et al. (2006), for instance, sought to provide evidence for the relevance of what they term the ‘‘Time-RP’’ metaphor (i.e., an Ego-free MT perspective; Section 3.2). In order to foreground the anterior/posterior relation, which is also inherent in nondeictic event sequences (B-series), they used visual primes that consist of a graphical array of objects sliding horizontally across a screen. Likewise, in order to demonstrate the relevance of an ‘‘extrinsic’’ (= absolute) FoR, Kranjec (2006) attempted to foreground the superordinate field, with two types of stimuli: a single entity moving over some kind of ground, and the picture of a river coming down from a mountain, for which the path of motion had to be indicated. Finally, Rothe-Wulf and colleagues (2014) intended to directly investigate the relation between four distinct spatial FoRs and their temporal counterparts, as proposed by Bender and colleagues (2010). In order to activate a specific (spatial) FoR, they used as primes three sets of pictures, all of which show a superordinate entity in motion (i.e., a conveyor belt, train, or river) as well as smaller entities located in the superordinate entity; when required for the relative FoR, an observer (outside this superordinate entity) was added to the picture. The picture was accompanied by a few sentences that describe the scene in a way compatible with one of the four FoRs to be foregrounded in the respective condition. A final test question on the relation between two entities ensured that participants indeed adopted the primed FoR. 5.2. Analysis of bodily expressions Bodily expressions accompany most of what we try to communicate, ranging from the emotions we are experiencing (Darwin, 1872; Meeren, van Heijnsbergen, & de Gelder, 2005; Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010) to complex cognitive ideas (Goldin-Meadow, 2003; McNeill, 1992). The two types of bodily expressions that have been used to date for investigating space–time mapping include co-speech gesture and postural sway. 5.2.1. Co-speech gesture People spontaneously and mostly unconsciously use gesture in conjunction with words (Iverson & GoldinMeadow, 1998; McNeill, 1992; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006),

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and these gestures may convey meaning that is not only relevant to their verbal expressions but also completes them (Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Le Guen, 2011a). As gestures naturally unfold in space, they also provide ecologically valid information about how abstract concepts are spatially structured by the speaker (Cooperrider & Núñez, 2009; Núñez et al., 2012). The task assigned to elicit gestural data is similar to the previously described language elicitation task in that its main purpose is to induce people to talk about a certain domain, for instance by asking them to explain temporal expressions (Núñez et al., 2012), to re-tell a brief story they have just studied (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012), or to tell the (depicted) history of the universe (Cooperrider & Núñez, 2009). To capture co-speech gesture, people are videotaped while talking, for later transcription and analysis. For the investigation of spatial and temporal representations, coding the position and orientation of the speaker (with regard to the fixed bearings of a potential absolute frame of reference) is crucial. Ideally, this orientation is rotated midway through the interview to disentangle overlapping FoRs (Le Guen, 2011a). It may also be revealing to contrast indoor and outdoor settings, as blocking visual contact with landmarks may suspend a possible adoption of the absolute FoR (Núñez et al., 2012). For data analysis, references to deictic time versus non-deictic or sequence time need to be distinguished, as these two are assumed to recruit distinct axes (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Emmorey, 2002; Núñez et al., 2012). To compare spontaneous with deliberate gesture production, Casasanto and Jasmin (2012) also asked their participants to make gesture demonstrations that they believe would most naturally accompany speech about earlier and later times. A reversed strategy was employed by Jamalian and Tversky (2012) who provided gestures together with the verbal description of a cyclical temporal sequence (e.g., from seed to flower) or with the Wednesday’s meeting task. Participants were then asked to depict the sequence in schematic diagrams or indicate the next step after its completion, or to identify the date to which the meeting has been moved, respectively. Responses were then coded according to whether they are in line with the accompanying circular versus linear gesture (in sequence description) or forward versus backward gesture (the Wednesday’s meeting task). 5.2.2. Postural sway People do not only speak with their hands; often, their whole body is involved. The fact that this type of information may reveal underlying conceptions of time has been shown by Miles et al. (2010). They requested participants to embark on a mental time travel into the future (i.e., to imagine what their everyday life circumstances might be like four years in the future = prospection) or the past (to recall such circumstances four years previously = retrospection) and to envisage the events of a typical day. A magnetic motion-tracking system was used to measure movement (postural sway) in the horizontal plane.

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5.3. Mapping temporal relations on spatial layouts The third type of task, like the previous one, is largely non-linguistic and recruits space as the medium for temporal representations, but does so in a less spontaneous way. Over the years, the following variants have been developed, which differ in sometimes small, but important aspects, and are therefore described sequentially. 5.3.1. Graphic productions The task was designed by Tversky, Kugelmass, and Winter (1991) to explore how space comes to be used for representing non-spatial relations. Five sub-tasks are used, with one each devoted to spatial, imagined spatial, temporal, quantitative, and preference concepts (each including two or three parts). In the temporal sub-task, participants are provided with a reference point in space: A sticker, which represents the middle event of a tripartite sequence, is placed on a blank sheet of paper. Sequences consist of meals, activities, and times of the day. The instructions run as in the following example (for children): ‘‘Now I want you to think about the times of day that we eat meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I will put a sticker down for lunch time, and I want you to put a sticker for dinner time and a sticker for breakfast time. Here’s where I’m putting a sticker for lunch time. Now you put a sticker for dinner time (pause), and another sticker for breakfast time.’’ (Tversky et al., 1991, p. 526) The task produces two general types of data: the type of the representation (i.e., nonlinear, ordered, or interval), and its direction. Of interest here is the direction of the ordered representations. To be categorized as ‘‘ordered’’, stickers had to be separate, properly ordered (in any direction), and more or less in one line7; direction was scored as left-to-right (LR), right-to-left (RL), top-to-bottom (TB), and bottom-to-top (BT). Please note that, in this case, ‘‘top’’ and ‘‘bottom’’ refer to the sheet of paper used as pad and thus are located in the horizontal plane. In other studies (e.g., Brown, 2012) and the remainder of this review, these responses are categorized instead as far-to-near (FN) and near-to-far (NF), respectively. As described above (in Section 5.2.1), Jamalian and Tversky (2012, Exp. 1) asked participants to construct ‘‘a simple schematic diagram’’ to convey cyclical temporal sequences that were described to them verbally (accompanied by gestural priming). In this case, diagrams are coded as circular (with the last event being connected back to the first) or linear (without any such connection). 5.3.2. Temporal landscapes A similar principle is used by Zinken, Sampaio, da Silva Sinha, and Sinha (2005; and see Sinha et al., 2011) for their temporal landscapes task, which consists of three parts. In 7 Examples of nonlinear responses included stickers forming a triangle rather than a line or representing events out of order (e.g., breakfast— dinner—lunch). Unfortunately, this category was excluded from the analysis, which eliminated not only 15–40% of the data for the youngest children and 6–25% for the older children, but also, and more importantly, potential information on nonlinear time concepts.

the two calendar installations, participants are provided with a larger number of tokens to be used as representations of conventional time intervals (i.e., seasons and their sub-intervals or constituents, and times of the day). Participants are then asked to ‘‘make a map of the year (or day)’’, in which each token should represent one interval of time. The design of this task differs from the previous one, in that it (i) more strongly emphasizes the cyclical character of the temporal entities under scrutiny by using terms for the annual and diurnal cycle and by illustrating the task with a circular diagram, (ii) provides a substantially larger number of tokens which, in principle, allows for a broader variety of arrangements, and (iii) does not prompt participants with a reference point (i.e., the central stage is not placed for them). The third part of the task, the time landscape game, involves tokens to be used as representations of time intervals. Two of these tokens (or a token and a doll) are placed in line, perpendicular to the participant’s gaze. One token is then moved along the imaginary line so that it reverses its position in relation to the other token (or the doll, respectively). Participants are asked to describe what they saw. 5.3.3. Picture arrangement task Chan and Bergen (2005; Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012) developed Tversky’s design into a card arrangement task, in which the tokens are not blank but contain black and white images of the entities in question. The five sets of three cards each depict growing stages of a living being (i.e., tree, chicken, butterfly, frog, and woman). As in the original study (Tversky et al., 1991), the cards have to be arranged on a white sheet of paper ‘‘in sequence from the earliest to the latest stage’’ (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012, p. 3), but participants are not prompted with a reference point. 5.3.4. Time arrangement tasks The question that is most relevant for this review is whether the spatial FoRs that are preferred in a given speech community may have an impact on how its members conceptualize the passage of time. To address this question, the layout tasks had to be further modified: A rotation of participants halfway through the sitting is essential in order to disambiguate responses with respect to whether they are based on an absolute s-FoR (oriented, e.g., in line with cardinal directions) or a relative s-FoR (from the participant’s own perspective). The version of the task designed specifically for this purpose consists of two parts: a card arranging task and a time-points task (Boroditsky, Gaby, & Levinson, 2008). For the card arranging task, eight sets of four cards each are used. The cards in each set contain photographs that depict a temporal progression, such as stages in a life cycle or an event developing through time. Participants are asked to set them down ‘‘so that they are in the correct order’’. For the time-points task, participants are provided with a reference point—for instance, by pointing abstractly to a central spot in the air (affording a 3D representation) or by placing a token on the ground directly in front of the participant (for a 2D representation)—and are then asked to locate related temporal expressions in reference to the first mark. More specifically, the instructions are

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shaped as follows: ‘‘If I tell you that this here is today, where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?’’ Altogether, twelve sets of three temporally ordered terms each are used. The sessions are videotaped and responses coded for later analysis. The tasks are described in more detail in the MPI Field Manual (Boroditsky et al., 2008; also available online) and are part of a larger cross-linguistic survey on temporal representations (for respective studies, see Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Brown, 2012; de Sousa, 2012; Fedden & Boroditsky, 2012; Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Gaby, 2012; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012; Levinson & Majid, 2013).

rently popular actors) and non-lateralized (presented center-screen). Stimulus category (‘‘before’’ or ‘‘after’’ participants were born) is indicated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response keys. In a second experiment, verbal stimuli are presented center-screen, followed by a white circle that may appear on the left or right side of the screen. Circle location is indicated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response keys. Whereas the question pursued in Experiment 1 (as in previous studies) is whether congruent space–time mapping facilitates temporal judgments, Experiment 2 investigates whether temporal cues may affect visuospatial attention and facilitate spatial responses.

5.4. Implicit tasks: reaction time paradigm based on congruency priming

5.4.3. Speech balloon with tensed words, twofold displaced In addition to the stimuli used in the first task (Santiago et al., 2007), the main experiment in Torralbo, Santiago, and Lupiáñez’ (2006) study introduces an external perspective: Participants are presented center-screen with a side-view silhouette of a person’s head, looking either left- or rightwards. The verbal stimuli are presented in a speech balloon and appear either in the back or front of the silhouette, either on the left or right side of the screen. In one version, stimulus category (past/future) is indicated verbally, while in another version, it is indicated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response keys. Trials can be congruent along the lateral (left/right) axis and/or along the sagittal (back/front) axis (in the second version this is further crossed with response congruency).

The final type of task is also largely non-linguistic, but takes an indirect approach by contrasting experimental conditions that are either congruent or incongruent with assumed spatio-temporal links. The task labels used here are invented on the spot (derived from the stimuli used) to aid discrimination of and reference to these tasks in the remainder of the paper. Stimuli typically belong to either a past or future category (e.g., words in the past vs. future tense, or pictures of persons or buildings from the past vs. present/future, of persons at a younger vs. older age, or events at an earlier vs. later stage). Stimuli are presented on a computer screen and have to be categorized, typically by pressing one of two keys. Mapping each stimulus category to one of the two locations of the keys creates congruent and incongruent conditions. For instance, mapping past onto the left key and future onto the right constitutes one condition (presumably the congruent one), while the reversed mapping constitutes the other condition. Participants’ reaction time and accuracy in making their decision are recorded. If mapping conditions produce a main effect, the faster (and/or more accurate) condition is identified as the congruent condition, thus revealing the existence and direction of the underlying cognitive space–time mapping. The experimental designs described in the following modify this general idea in various ways, some of which are crucial for data interpretation. 5.4.1. Tensed words, laterally displaced Participants are presented with verbal stimuli, one after another, which may appear either on the left or right side of the screen. The stimuli consist of tensed verbs and temporal adverbs. Stimulus category (past/future) is indicated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response keys (Santiago, Lupiáñez, Pérez, & Funes, 2007; for different versions of this task, see also Ouellet, Santiago, Funes, & Lupiáñez, 2010a; Ouellet, Santiago, Israeli, & Gabay, 2010b). 5.4.2. Actors of two ages, non-lateralized A similar design is used in Experiment 1 of Weger and Pratt’s (2008) study, but with two crucial modifications: Their stimuli are non-ordered (pictures of formerly or cur-

5.4.4. Temporal entities of two stages, non-lateralized A similar goal is pursued by Boroditsky, Fuhrman, and McCormick (2011), but in a different version: Instead of crossing a lateral condition with a sagittal one, they cross a lateral (horizontal) condition with a vertical one. To this end, participants are presented with pairs of images, one after the other, all appearing center-screen. Each pair of images depicts the same entity at two different stages (e.g., a picture of a person at a younger and an older age). Participants are asked whether the second image shows a conceptually earlier or later time-point than the first image. Responses are given by pressing one of two adjacent keys. For half of the participants, keys are arranged horizontally (on the left/right axis), while for the other half they are arranged vertically (perpendicular to the tabletop, on the up/down axis). 5.4.5. Buildings of two ages, non-lateralized A similar principle is adopted by Miles, Tan, Noble, Lumsden, and Macrae (2011), with the exception that the vertical response is not defined in 3-dimensional, but in 2-dimensional space. Participants are presented with images, one after another, all appearing center-screen. The images depict buildings and cities, representing the past or a (science fiction) future. Stimulus category (past/ future) is indicated by pressing one of four spatially displaced response keys, to which participants have to move their finger right versus left (horizontal condition) or up versus down (vertical condition). Please note that, although

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for vertical responses the same keypad was used, it was mounted on an incline to ensure up/down movements to some extent. 5.4.6. Temporal sequences, non-lateralized A version that extends stimuli presentation to larger sequences was designed by Santiago, Román, Ouellet, Rodríguez, and Pérez-Azor (2010) to investigate not only congruency effects for space–time mapping, but also a possible distance effect for temporal entities that are more or less removed from a reference point. To this end, participants are presented with an unfolding sequence of everyday activities (in one version by way of video clips, in a second version by way of pictures) at full screen size. This is followed by an order judgment task: Whether a given scene comes ‘‘before’’ or ‘‘after’’ the reference scene is indicated by pressing one of two laterally displaced response keys. 5.5. Discussion of methods and tasks The four types of tasks described above differ not only in the details of how they are designed and conducted, but also in the questions they allow us to address. In the following, we briefly discuss their strengths and weaknesses, before turning to the data obtained from them. For identifying temporal frames of reference and assessing the degree to which they reflect space–time mapping, a language elicitation task provides a necessary first step. After all, temporal referencing is a linguistic activity, and systematic data collection on how people do this provides the foundation for any subsequent analysis. In space, this can be accomplished in a straightforward manner, and large-scale surveys have bestowed on us a cornucopia of data on cross-cultural variability in spatial FoR use (e.g., Beller et al., 2014; Bennardo, 2002; Haun et al., 2006, 2011; Hüther et al., 2013; Levinson, 2003; Levinson & Wilkins, 2006; Majid et al., 2004; Senft, 1997). The same is not true for the temporal domain—partly due to its non-tangible nature, and partly due to the ongoing debate on what might count as an act of referencing in contrast to simply reading off the meaning from the words used. The Wednesday’s meeting task (see Section 5.1.1) provides an exception in that it allows for more than one reading, which opens the door for experimental manipulations aimed at testing potentially influential factors. However, the task is peculiar in at least two ways. First, it employs a dynamic situation (the movement of an event), whereas in the spatial domain, static settings are more typically used. As mentioned above, there is some controversy as to whether static and dynamic settings are fundamentally different (Tenbrink, 2011) or may be covered by the same, slightly modified typology of FoRs (Bender et al., 2010, 2012; Levinson, 2003). The second peculiarity is related to the previous concern in that this whole line of research hinges on one type of phrase and its possible readings: ‘‘Moving X forward’’ is not only inherently under-specified in theory (Rothe-Wulf et al., 2014), but also happens to produce ambiguity in practice, at least among speakers of

English (the same is true for ‘‘advancing X’’ and ‘‘pushing X back’’; see McGlone & Harding, 1998). To the best of our knowledge, these three phrases provide the only instance of such an ambiguity and thus have to shoulder the entire weight of empirical testing in this field. The fact that in many other languages, these phrases are not discernibly ambiguous—in the sense of producing equally split readings—renders cross-linguistic comparisons a controversial endeavor. In contrast to this linguistic task, the documentation of bodily expressions (Section 5.2), the spatial layout tasks (Section 5.3), and the implicit tasks based on congruency priming (Section 5.4) do not take verbal output as their prime data, but recruit space as the (implicit) medium for expressing temporal relations. As participants are typically not aware of the purpose of the tasks, they are likely to respond spontaneously, thus revealing implicit representations. In stark contrast to the implicit congruency tasks, the other two types (bodily expressions and spatial layout tasks) entail a largely open format, which makes them highly suitable for exploratory purposes. But even these tasks are not entirely impartial: Postural sway and most versions of the layout tasks (except for the 3D version of the time-points task; Section 5.3.4) are restricted to 2dimensional responses in the horizontal plane, thus preempting vertical representations. And in some cases (such as possibly in the temporal landscape task described in Section 5.3.2), the tokens used may be too large in size and number to afford unrestricted arrangement in the available working space (Sinha et al., 2011, p. 151). Even the gestural data (including the 3D pointing task) is constrained to some extent by the body, which blocks genuinely backwards pointing. Furthermore, the basic question of whether space–time mappings are considered sensible in a speech community cannot be answered unambiguously with these tasks. Both bodily expressions and spatial layouts have an inherent spatial dimension. Co-speech gestures and postural sway unfold in space, regardless of the domain for which they may be emblematic. Likewise, abstract pointing and arrangement of tokens is also fundamentally spatial in nature. In all of these cases, any possibly observed crossdomain consistency could be attributed to this shared spatial dimension, whereas unsystematic response patterns may have multiple causes (Bender et al., 2012). The implicit tasks based on congruency priming, on the other hand, do allow the extent of such space–time mapping to be assessed. Most often, however, they are fairly restrictive with regard to the dimension for which congruency is assumed and/or scrutinized (in most examples for this type of task, this is the lateral left/right axis). Moreover, task-specific characteristics appear to affect participants’ responses (Torralbo et al., 2006). To sum up, the Wednesday’s meeting task is useful for discriminating several t-FoRs (at least to a certain extent) and for identifying factors influencing their adoption. Its weaknesses are its singularity, the fact that it predominantly produces linguistic data, and that these data are not unambiguous. Bodily expressions and spatial layouts, on the other hand, are non-verbal and more implicit, and

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provide an efficient way to assess spatial representations of time. However, the evidence they obtain is at least partly confounded with the inherent spatial nature of the task. Implicit congruency tasks, finally, yield more valid data on the true extent of space–time mapping, but cannot be used for exploring the full space of mapping options, and cannot be informative of referencing preferences, as they typically pre-define response patterns (e.g., along the left/ right dimension). Since no single task is adequate to answer the full set of questions in a satisfactory manner, the best advice that can be derived from this overview is to combine different methods and exploit a variety of data sources. 6. Empirical evidence The following overview comprises some thirty empirical studies on temporal representations and space–time mapping. With few exceptions, none of these studies explicitly addresses temporal FoRs; however, their findings are relevant and instructive for assessing the theoretical accounts presented in the first part of this review. The studies compiled here include, in total, speakers of sixteen different languages, which will be pooled into nine clusters based on relatedness. Although some of the studies were designed as cross-linguistic comparisons, we first present data for each language cluster separately (current section; overview in Table 9); this allows us to provide some descriptive information on each of the clusters as a background for the empirical findings—especially for those cases for which strong claims on variability have been put forward. The relevance of these findings for the theoretical questions posed above is then discussed in Section 7. 6.1. Indo-European languages Of the languages belonging to the Indo-European family, four have been investigated to a considerable extent in this field of research: English, Swedish, German, and Spanish. We take English as the starting point—for the sole reason that most studies were conducted with speakers of this language and that respective findings are occasionally (even if implicitly) taken as a reference point or even as indicative of temporal representations and processing in general. 6.1.1. English English belongs to the Germanic branch of the IndoEuropean language family. According to Ethnologue8, it is the native language to 335 million people around the world, and an official or national language in more than 50 countries. With two exceptions, the findings reported here all originate from studies conducted in the US (especially in California, with some additional data from Illinois, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Hawai’i); Weger 8 Where available, information on numbers of speakers was taken from Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/; see also Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2013).

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and Pratt (2008) collected their data in Toronto/Canada, and Miles and colleagues (2010, 2011) in Aberdeen/ Scotland. A wealth of data is available on patterns of reference and spatial representations (overview in Levinson, 2003), on spatial gesture (e.g., Goldin-Meadow, 2003; McNeill, 1992), and on metaphorical space–time mappings in language (e.g., Bennett, 1975; Clark, 1973; Evans, 2003; Haspelmath, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976; Radden, 2004; Traugott, 1978). In a nutshell, these studies indicate that speakers of English make use of all three spatial FoRs for describing locations and movements in space (with a preference for intrinsic and relative in small-scale space, and absolute in largescale space), that spatial vocabulary is mapped onto time (which is what triggered this line of research in the first place), and that time in co-speech gesture is also spatially construed (Cienki, 1998; McNeill, 1992). The metaphorical space–time mapping adopted in language suggests preferential recruitment of the sagittal axis, with past and future mapped on BACK and FRONT, respectively (e.g., the future ‘‘ahead’’, and olden days ‘‘passed by’’). As we have seen above, however, the reverse direction is also possible, attested to in language elicitation tasks (Section 5.1), in which only half of the speakers tend to move Wednesday’s meeting ‘‘forward’’ to a future date, while the other half moves it pastwards. Interestingly, however, this linguistic preference was confirmed on a behavioral level only in a minority of empirical studies. In a spatial layout task, Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 1b [3D pointing]) found a small percentage of responses along the sagittal axis. Postural sway is also compatible with a BF9 time line (Miles et al., 2010), and data on deliberate gestures reveal that people do conceptualize time along this time line (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012, Exp. 1). Data on spontaneous gestures, however, indicates adoption of the sagittal axis for deictic time only and with considerable flexibility (i.e., no marked preference for BF over FB; see Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012, Exp. 2). More importantly, these data attest to a preference of the lateral axis over the sagittal axis, specifically for sequence time (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012). Adoption of the sagittal axis for deictic and of the lateral axis for non-deictic expressions—with future in front or to the right, and past in the back or to the left—has also been documented for American Sign Language ASL (Emmorey, 2002) and French (Calbris, 1990). The remainder of the findings, including some gestural data, most spatial layout data, and all congruency priming data, coherently indicate a preference for the lateral axis in LR direction (see Table 9). Although the design of most of these studies restricted the range of possible responses to one or two dimensions, this constraint does not hold generally and does not invalidate the general trend (see especially Fuhrman et al., 2011). The empirical studies across a broad range of methods thus suggest that native speakers of English recruit two distinct axes: (i) the sagittal axis, presumably in both

9

Abbreviations of directions are explained in footnote to Table 9.

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Table 9 Preferences for dimension and direction of the time line axes (direction in brackets were given with still substantial, but lower frequency than main responses). Language

Main findings

Type of task

Design

n

English

BF and FB

Moving meeting

BF design (ling.)

LR

Gesture

BF (and LR) LR (and BF/FB) BF LR LR

Gesture (delib.) Gesture (spont.) Postural sway Spatial layout Spatial layout Spatial layout

Open (LR stimuli) Open Open Open On plane Open On plane and open

279 Bender et al. (2010), Rothe-Wulf et al. (2014)a 50 Cooperrider and Núñez (2009)

LR (and BF ¼ NF) LR LR LR

References

32 28 20 520 13 24

Casasanto and Jasmin (2012, Exp. 1) Casasanto and Jasmin (2012, Exp. 2) Miles et al. (2010) Tversky et al. (1991) Boroditsky (2008) Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 1)

Spatial layout Spatial layout Congr. priming

On plane On plane

LR

Congr. priming

LR

Congr. priming

LR LR LR

Congr. priming Congr. priming Congr. priming

LR design Horiz. vs. vertical (inclined) Horiz. vs. vertical 3D LR vs: TB ½¼ FN

118 Boroditsky et al. (2011) 59 Fuhrman et al. (2011) 32 Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013)

Swedish

BF

Moving meeting

BF design (ling.)

284 Rothe-Wulf et al. (2014)

German

FB

Moving meeting

BF design (ling.)

LR

Congr. priming

LR design

279 Bender et al. (2010), Rothe-Wulf et al. (2014) 30 Ulrich and Maienborn (2010; Exp. 1)

BF

Congr. priming

BF design

60 Ulrich et al. (2012, Exp. 1)

BF

Congr. priming

BF þ LR

57 Torralbo et al. (2006)

Spanish

LR

Hebrew

LR design

85 Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 2+3) 19 Miles et al. (2011, Exp. 1)

LR design

LR

Congr. priming

LR design

32 Santiago et al. (2007)

LR

Congr. priming

LR design

96 Santiago et al. (2010)

LR

Congr. priming

LR design

93 Ouellet et al. (2010a)

LR

Congr. priming

LR design

More RL than LR

Spatial layout Spatial layout

On plane On plane and open

RL (and BF ¼ NF) RL

Congr. priming

LR design

RL

Congr. priming

LR design

Arabic

RL (and TB [= FN])

Spatial layout

On plane

Mandarin (US)

LR (and UD) LR and UD

Spatial layout Congr. priming

Open Horiz. vs. vertical BF design (ling.) On plane 3D

Mandarin (P.R. China)

10 Boroditsky and Gaby (2010) 10 Bergen and Chan Lau (2012) 50 Weger and Pratt (2008)

20 Ouellet et al. (2010b) 366 Tversky et al. (1991) 24 Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 1) 82 Fuhrman and Boroditsky (2010, Exp. 2 + 3) 28 Ouellet et al. (2010b) 283 Tversky et al. (1991) 42 Boroditsky (2008) 63 Boroditsky et al. (2011) 163 Bender et al. (2010)

FB

Moving meeting

LR (and TB [= FN]) UD (and LR) LR

Spatial layout Congr. priming Congr. priming

Mandarin (Taiwan)

LR and TB [= FN] (and RL) LR (and UD) TB [= FN]

Spatial layout Spatial layout Congr. priming

Mandarin (Singapore)

LR and TB [= FB/UD] LR and TB [= FB/UD]

Spatial layout Congr. priming

On plane Horiz. vs. vertical (inclined)

Cantonese

LR (and RL)

Spatial layout

On plane and open

Tongan

BF + FB

Moving meeting

Yupno

down-/uphill

Gesture

Open

Yélî Dnye

LR > NF/FN > East/West

Spatial layout

On plane

10 Levinson and Majid (2013)

Kuuk Thaayorre

East/West East/West

Spatial layout Spatial layout

On plane On plane

14 Boroditsky and Gaby (2010) 6 Gaby (2012)

Aymara

FB (and LR)

Gesture

Open

30 Núñez and Sweetser (2006)

Tzeltal Maya

LR > NF > East/West > DU > down-/uphill

Spatial layout

On plane

12 Brown (2012)

LR vs: TB ½¼ FN On plane Open LR vs: TB ½¼ FN

BF design (ling.)

33 Bergen and Chan Lau (2012) 75 Fuhrman et al. (2011) 40 Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013) 38 Bergen and Chan Lau (2012) 15 Boroditsky (2008) 32 Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013) 32 Miles et al. (2011, Exp. 2) 25 Miles et al. (2011, Exp. 1) 10 de Sousa (2012) 120 Bender et al. (2010) 27 Núñez et al. (2012)

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Main findings

Type of task

Yucatec Maya

cyclical (radial) Gesture LR > DU > RL > cycle > FN > NF Spatial layout

Open On plane and open

Amondawa

LR and RL

On plane

Spatial layout

Design

n

References 10 Le Guen and Pool Balam (2012) 26 Le Guen and Pool Balam (2012) 4 Sinha et al. (2011)

Note. The following abbreviations are used (here and in the remainder of this paper): LR = lateral axis (left/right, without indication of direction), LR = left-to-right, RL = right-to-left; BF = sagittal axis (back/front, without indication of direction), BF = back-to-front, FB = front-to-back; UD = vertical axis (up/down, without indication of direction), UD = up-to-down, DU = down-to-up (observed as pile-up solution in the card task only); in contrast to TB in real space; TB = top–bottom (top/bottom, without indication of direction), TB = top-to-bottom; BT = bottom-to-top; please note that this orientation is specified in the reference frame of a sheet of paper or the computer keyboard, with ‘‘top’’ referring to the top (further away side) of the page or keyboard, respectively (as used, e.g., by Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Tversky et al., 1991); more accurately, it would be classified as FN = far-to-near or NF = near-to-far, respectively (in the case of Miles et al., 2011, reclassification as FB or even UD is also acceptable). a Converging data on English with language elicitation tasks was also collected, among others, by McGlone and Harding (1998), Boroditsky (2000), Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002), Kranjec (2006), and Núñez et al. (2006). Although not reported here, these are referred to in the discussion of findings in the text.

directions (preferably BF when linguistically referring to deictic time, with past events as in their back and future events as ahead, but also reversed in some cases), and (ii) the lateral axis exclusively in LR direction, when depicting the unfolding of events, for instance in writing, graphs, or signed language. Both axes are not only cognitively available for information processing, but also appear to be embodied to a certain extent, as emerging in co-speech gesture and postural sway. 6.1.2. Swedish and German Swedish and German, like English, belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Swedish is spoken as the native language by roughly 8 million people in Sweden (with some additional distribution in Denmark and Finland). German is spoken as the native language by roughly 84 million people, mostly in Central Europe (with some additional major settlements in Kazakhstan, Namibia, and Paraguay), and is an official language in five states. The findings reported here originate from studies conducted in Sweden (Göteborg) and Germany (Freiburg and Tübingen), respectively. Compared to English, considerably less research has been conducted in these two languages on patterns of reference and spatial representations (and none, to the best of our knowledge, on temporal co-speech gesture; for exceptions, see Ladewig, 2011; Müller, 1998, 2008). Yet, speakers of German are known to make use of all three spatial FoRs for describing locations and movements in space, with a preference for the intrinsic and relative FoR (and here for the reflective variant) in small-scale space, and the absolute FoR in large-scale space (Beller et al., 2014; Grabowski & Weiß, 1996a, 1996b; Herrmann & Grabowski, 1998; Herrmann & Schweizer, 1998), and most likely the same is true for speakers of Swedish (Grabowski & Weiß, 1996a). The existing literature also reports extensive metaphorical space–time mappings in language (e.g., Grabowski & Miller, 2000; Grabowski & Weiß, 1996a, 1996b; Hellberg, 2007; Radden, 2004). As in English, the linguistic space–time mapping adopted in Swedish and German suggests preferential recruitment of the sagittal axis, with past and future mapped on BACK and FRONT, respectively. Interestingly, however,

speakers of the two languages differ fundamentally in how they respond to the Wednesday’s meeting task: The vast majority of Swedish speakers move the meeting ‘‘forward’’ to a later date, German speakers to an earlier date (Bender et al., 2010; Rothe-Wulf, Beller, & Bender, 2014). Recruitment of the sagittal axis BF in speakers of German was also observed in a congruency priming task, in which responses to past- versus future-related sentences had to be made by moving a (sagittal) slider back and forth (Ulrich et al., 2012). However, when left- versus right-hand responses were required instead, the obtained congruency effect reflected a time line along the lateral axis LR (Ulrich & Maienborn, 2010). As these two studies used the exact same material (i.e., tensed sentences that either did or did not have meaning), it appears unlikely that recruitment of either axis (exclusively) depends on the deictic or non-deictic nature of the stimulus. 6.1.3. Spanish Spanish belongs to the Romance branch of the IndoEuropean language family. It is spoken as the native language by roughly 400 million people around the world, and is an official or national language in more than 20 countries. The findings reported here all originate from studies conducted in Spain (largely from Granada). The majority of studies so far predominantly explored space–time mappings by way of congruency priming tasks and report a strong preference for the lateral axis in LR direction (Ouellet et al., 2010a, 2010b; Santiago et al., 2007, 2010; Torralbo et al., 2006). By requesting a left/right mapping on response keys, however, the task specifics may have suggested this kind of mapping. The fact that mapping may switch depending on such context factors has been demonstrated by Torralbo et al. (2006). In one version of the speech balloon task (Section 5.4.3), responses had to be given by pressing one of two keys, and participants exhibited a main effect of LR congruency. However, in the version in which responses were given vocally, the LR congruency effect gave way to a BF congruency effect. These findings indicate a preference for the sagittal mapping for time, but sufficient flexibility in this preference to be overridden in tasks that emphasize the lateral axis (Torralbo et al., 2006).

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Two aspects are additionally noteworthy. First, the adopted temporal perspective—even for deictic stimuli— need not be egocentric, but may be allocentric. The point of view to be taken in the speech balloon task is anchored in the face silhouette on the screen, and aligned to its perspective. In a similar fashion, the congruency priming task by Santiago and colleagues (2010), described in Section 5.4.6, asked participants to adopt a specific scene within a sequence as the reference point and to decide whether another scene comes ‘‘before’’ or ‘‘after’’ it (whereas from the participants’ point of view, all scenes had come before now). In both studies (combined n = 126), participants exhibited congruency effects relative to this requested point of view. And second, the study by Santiago and colleagues (2010) also obtained a distance effect: Responses were faster, when the target scene was more distant from the reference scene. In other words, proximal scenes are harder to discriminate from a reference scene than distal scenes—in either direction, past and future. 6.2. Hebrew and Arabic Hebrew and Arabic belong to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Hebrew is spoken by 5 million people, basically in Israel (with some additional distribution elsewhere, specifically as the liturgical language); Arabic is spoken by roughly 225 million people in Northern Africa and the Middle East, and is an official language in 26 states. All findings reported here (including those on Arabic speakers) originate from studies conducted in Israel. The variable that has attracted most interest is the—compared to English—reversed writing direction. In their seminal study, Tversky and colleagues (1991) compared speakers of three languages with different writing systems: English, which is written left to right (LR), Arabic, which is written right to left (RL), and Hebrew in which letters are written RL, but most characters are formed, numbers written, and arithmetic operations performed in the opposite direction, LR (Tversky et al., 1991; and see Shaki, Fischer, & Petrusic, 2009). As detailed in Section 5.3.1, the study comprised five tasks, and the main finding for the temporal task was a strong effect of language: a clear LR preference among English speakers, a strong RL and secondary TB preference among Arabic speakers, and more RL than LR among Hebrew speakers (please recall that, what in the classification of Tversky et al., 1991, is labeled TB, is actually performed along the sagittal axis and thus corresponds to FN). These findings were taken as evidence for the assumption that temporal relations are indeed represented by spatial means, and that the direction of writing and reading affects the direction of the temporal representation. A preference for the lateral axis (RL) in Hebrew has also been found in subsequent studies and with modified techniques (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Ouellet et al., 2010b), some of which, however, had a design that constrained responses to the lateral axis. The only other spatial layout task (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010, Exp. 1b [3D pointing]) also produced a small percentage of responses along the sagittal axis, but unfortunately, the exact proportion of responses and direction of the axis remain unclear (18.2%

of all responses, aggregated across English and Hebrew speakers, are reported to ‘‘put later events further in front of the body 93% of the time’’). 6.3. Chinese China is home to speakers of roughly 300 different languages, which belong to eight major language families. Chinese is the name for a cluster of languages that together make up the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Many of the languages in the Chinese cluster are not mutually intelligible, and some of these are comprised of varieties that are not mutually intelligible either. Two of the largest languages in this cluster are Mandarin and Yue (Cantonese). Mandarin is spoken as the native language by roughly 850 million people, basically in Northern and Southwestern China, and is an official language in the People’s Republic of China (P. R. China), Taiwan, and Singapore. Cantonese is spoken by roughly 62 million people in P. R. China, Singapore and Malaysia, and is the official language of Hong Kong and Macau. The findings reported here originate from studies conducted with speakers of Mandarin living in the US, in P. R. China (especially Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shijiazhuang), in Taiwan, and in Singapore, and with speakers of Cantonese living in Hong Kong and Macau. Notably, with just one exception, none of these studies was conducted in an area where Mandarin is the prevailing language (in Guangzhou this would be Cantonese, in Shanghai Wu, in Taiwan Min or Hakka, and in Singapore Hoklo). However, despite its (linguistic) status as one of many Chinese varieties, Mandarin is also an official language and often the lingua franca in most Chinese-speaking states; it is the variety on which most writing is based; and the people who participated in most of the following studies are reported to be highly fluent in Mandarin. With regard to spatial frames of reference, speakers of (Mandarin) Chinese make use of all three major FoRs, albeit with considerable regional variation (e.g., the preference for the absolute FoR is stronger in Northern parts than in the South; see Li & Zhang, 2009), and they prefer the translational variant of the relative FoR over the reflective one (Beller et al., 2014). For most of their history, the two Chinese languages under scrutiny here were written in vertical columns top-to-bottom (TB), ordered from right-to-left (RL). This has gradually changed in recent decades and to a diverging extent: Whereas in Taiwan, the traditional direction is still also used, writing in mainland China nowadays almost exclusively follows the Western pattern LR and TB (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013), and the same is true for Singapore (Miles et al., 2011). In contrast to Mandarin, Cantonese has no conventionalized writing and is largely used for informal communication. Direction of writing in Hong Kong and Macau is dominantly LR, followed by TB, whereas RL (which was dominant between the 1920s and 1950s), is nowadays exceedingly rare (de Sousa, 2012). In addition to the vertical direction of writing and reading, Mandarin also makes systematic and frequent use of vertical metaphors for space–time mapping. In line with

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the ‘river model’ of time, earlier times and the past are said to be ‘‘up’’, whereas later times and the future are ‘‘down’’ (Scott, 1989; Yu, 1998). Which of these two aspects affects metaphorical construals of time, if indeed either of them does so, is a matter of ongoing controversy. The point of origin for this controversy was a publication by Boroditsky (2001), who argued that the availability of vertical metaphors in Mandarin (in contrast to English, which almost exclusively uses horizontal spatial metaphors) affects temporal reasoning. In a priming paradigm, participants had to work on two spatial judgment tasks, followed by a temporal judgment task. The former consisted of questions on the relation between two objects, arranged either horizontally or vertically, whereas the latter consisted of questions on the spatial relationship between two temporal entities (such as ‘‘March comes earlier than April: true or false?’’). The spatiotemporal condition used the terms ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’, whereas the purely temporal condition used ‘‘earlier’’ and ‘‘later’’. In the spatiotemporal condition, both English- and Mandarin-speaking participants were faster after the horizontal than after the vertical spatial primes. The same was true in the temporal condition for the English speakers, whereas the Mandarin speakers showed the reversed pattern, being faster after the vertical primes. This latter finding was taken as support for the claim that Mandarin speakers conceptualize time vertically, whereas English speakers do so horizontally. This is only partly motivated, however, by the usage of vertical metaphors in addition to, but not instead of, horizontal metaphors in Mandarin. Mandarin speakers should therefore be more sensitive to vertical priming than English speakers (but about as likely to respond to vertical as to horizontal priming). Controversy arose when subsequent studies reported difficulties in replicating these findings (Chen, 2007; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; January & Kako, 2007; Tse & Altarriba, 2008; for successful replications and extensions, see Boroditsky, 2008; Boroditsky et al., 2011; Fuhrman et al., 2011; Miles et al., 2011; for a recent review on the debate, see Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; an overview of the main findings is provided in Table 10). The first generation of these studies was concerned with the cross-linguistic comparison and with questions pertaining to the degree of linguistic relativity involved. They were therefore focused on the dimension of space–time mapping and remained oblivious to questions of its direction. This

section of the current article is confined to findings for Chinese and pays specific attention to those studies that are informative on both dimension and direction. Findings with Mandarin speakers in the US (whose country of origin and native language is unclear) indicate a preference for the lateral axis LR, accompanied by a secondary preference for the vertical axis UD in an open design (Boroditsky, 2008), and activation of both axes in a congruency priming task (Boroditsky et al., 2011). Similar effects, by and large, are reported for Mandarin speakers in Singapore (Miles et al., 2011) and Taiwan (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Boroditsky, 2008; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013, although the latter found no evidence of an LR congruency effect). In contrast, findings for Mandarin speakers from P. R. China remain mixed: indicating an LR preference over TB [= FB] in an open design (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012), UD (over LR) in one congruency priming task (Fuhrman et al., 2011) and exclusively LR in another congruency priming task (Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013). A mix of reasons may contribute to this mix of findings, one clearly being regional variations. No two studies were conducted with the same language community, as indicated in the introduction to this section: Some studies included mixed samples of Chinese emigrants to the US (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Boroditsky, 2008; Boroditsky et al., 2011); others were conducted in Shijiazhuang in Hebei province (Bender et al., 2010), in Guangzhou, where Cantonese is dominant (Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013), in Shanghai, where Wu prevails (Fuhrman et al., 2011), in Taiwan (Boroditsky, 2008; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013), and in Singapore (Miles et al., 2011), respectively. As noted above, preferences for frames of reference may vary within the same country (Li & Zhang, 2009), and different traditions in writing and reading in some of these places may also affect the way in which people represent temporal relations (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Boroditsky et al., 2011; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; de Sousa, 2012). Matters may be complicated further by the fact that, what is labeled ‘‘horizontal’’ and ‘‘vertical’’ in this discussion, often conflates two dimensions: horizontal the sagittal and lateral dimension, especially in the stimuli used in the earlier studies (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001), and vertical the sagittal and genuinely vertical dimension, especially in the response modes in some of the later studies (e.g., Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013). In these latter cases, ‘‘vertical’’ does not refer to

Table 10 Relation of vertical (v) to horizontal (h) conceptions of time in English and Mandarin. Type of task Language elicitation with priming Participants’ language

Boroditsky (2001)

January and Kako (2007)

Chen (2007)

Tse and Altarriba (2008)

English Mandarin

vh

v=h –

(v = h) v=h

v>h v>h

3D pointing Boroditsky (2008)

Implicit task with congruency priming Boroditsky et al. (2011)

Fuhrman et al. (2011)

Miles et al. (2011)

Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013)

v
v
v
v
v h (Taiw.)

Note. The data summarized here show whether effects were stronger or weaker for vertical (v) than for horizontal (h) primes or arrangements, or whether they were basically equal.

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the upright orientation people typically adopt, but to the plane in which sheets of paper or computer keyboards are placed. The resulting ‘‘top/bottom’’ (TB) classification therefore usually translates into ‘‘front/back’’ (FB) or even only ‘‘further/nearer’’ (FN) along the sagittal axis in ‘real space’, which may be more relevant than previously assumed: Data collection with the Wednesday’s meeting question reveals a preference for the FB direction along the sagittal axis, with ‘‘forward’’ being mapped onto a pastwards movement (Bender et al., 2010). Findings from spatial layout tasks are at least compatible with, if not indicative of, the same FB (rather: FN) direction (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Miles et al., 2011), and the same is true for some of the congruency priming tasks (Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; Miles et al., 2011). Not compatible with a sagittal interpretation are the data reported in Boroditsky (2008) and Fuhrman et al. (2011), who used open formats or offered response modes in 3D (Boroditsky et al., 2011, had no sagittal option available). As long as only writing direction is assumed to affect temporal representations (as in the case of Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012), this conflation of vertical on paper and vertical in real space does not hamper consistent argumentation. If, however, genuinely vertical (‘‘up/down’’) space–time metaphors are a possible candidate for affecting temporal representations, these two dimensions need to be distinguished. The influence of writing direction itself also remains disputed. Four studies explicitly addressing this question report convincing evidence in favor of such an influence: de Sousa (2012) found generational differences in temporal representations as a function of changes in the direction of Chinese writing in past decades; Bergen and Chan Lau (2012) found spatial layouts in line with the prevailing (and distinct) writing directions in China versus Taiwan; and Boroditsky et al. (2011) as well as Chen and O’Seaghdha (2013) found the same pattern for congruency priming. In contrast, two studies report strong vertical patterns also for speech communities where Chinese is written LR (Fuhrman et al., 2011, Exp. 1; Miles et al., 2011). Apparently, writing direction is a powerful factor, but most likely not the only one to have an impact on temporal representations. 6.4. Tongan Tongan is an Austronesian language spoken in the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga, a small island group in the Southwest Pacific. Its (approx. 140,000) speakers make use of all three basic FoRs for spatial descriptions: For small-scale (and static as well as dynamic) settings, they prefer the intrinsic FoR and the relative FoR in its translational variant (Beller et al., 2014; Bender et al., 2012; Bennardo, 2000, 2009); for large-scale settings, they prefer the absolute FoR, which, depending on context, may be based on a radial land/sea axis or on cardinal directions (Bennardo, 2000, 2009). Linguistic overlap for space and time is considerable (Bender et al., 2005). In line with the range of FoRs preferred for space, Tongan speakers are also reported to respond in linguistic elicitations with the Wednesday’s

meeting task (see Section 5.1.1) in a variety of ways: 25.0% of responses reflect an absolute t-FoR, 36.7% an intrinsic t-FoR, and 30.8% the translation subtype of the relative t-FoR (Bender et al., 2010). Although the latter was predominantly chosen by the older generation and may thus be moribund, it attests to the possibility of such relative FoRs. 6.5. Yupno and Yélî Dnye Yupno and Yélî Dnye are both categorized as Papuan languages, but are not related to each other. Yupno is spoken by 5000 people in the Finisterre Range in northeastern Papua New Guinea, whereas Yélî Dnye is an isolated language spoken by the 5000 inhabitants of Rossel Island, off the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea. Speakers of Yupno prefer an absolute FoR for spatial descriptions on different scales, based on the topographic contrasts uphill/downhill, co-located with the source and mouth of the Yupno river (Wassmann, 1994). Yupno has isolated expressions for mapping spatial conceptualizations on time, but not in a systematic manner (Núñez et al., 2012). Despite this low degree of linguistic mapping, data on co-speech gesture (Section 5.2) indicate a transfer of referencing preferences. Gestural production while explaining temporal expressions reveal systematic spatialization of time: towards the ground indicating the present (or deictic center, which is spatially co-located with the speaker), downhill indicating the past, and uphill the future. This pattern, albeit deictically anchored in the speaker and his or her subjective present, is claimed to be largely allocentric and thus indicative of the same absolute FoR that is preferentially used in space (Núñez et al., 2012). Speakers of Yélî Dnye prefer an absolute (or geocentric) FoR for spatial descriptions, based on a combination of the mountain/sea axis with an East/West axis. They also make use of a body-based intrinsic FoR and to some extent even of a relative FoR (Levinson, 2006). Co-speech gesture is geocentrically anchored and geographically accurate (Levinson & Majid, 2013), and this partly constrains gestures on time. Spatial locations are recruited only when referring to the position of the sun or moon (other representations include gestures along the East/West axis and along a vertical axis with downwards denoting here and now, in contrast to upwards for a distant point in time). The basic concept of time is described as cyclical without calendrical fixed points, and the language possesses a rich system for the grammaticalization of time. Linguistic space–time mapping, however, is limited, and data collection with the time arrangement tasks (see Section 5.3.4) did not yield systematic patterns, either in the card arranging task or in the more abstract (2D) time-points task. The slight majority for relative responses (prevailingly left-toright) is most likely due to the fact that those who participated were at least partly literate. 6.6. Kuuk Thaayorre (Pormpuraaw settlement) Kuuk Thaayorre is a small Paman language spoken by Australian Aborigines in the settlement Pormpuraaw (Cape York Peninsula, Queensland; approx. 250 speakers). For

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describing locations and movements in space, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, like the Yupno, prefer the absolute FoR, invoked by one of six absolute directional root forms that refer to the four cardinal directions and the north and south banks of a nearby river. Although systematic data on cospeech gesture are still lacking, some evidence is reported for pointing towards the position of the sun for indicating time, and for pointing eastwards for indicating a distant past. The very few expressions applicable across domains consist of one term for both ‘‘place’’ and ‘‘time’’ and one term encoding both the intrinsic relation ‘‘in front of’’ and temporal priority (Gaby, 2012). Despite this paucity of linguistic space–time mappings, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers respond to the time arrangement tasks (Section 5.3) in line with an absolute FoR: mapping past to the East and future to the West (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Gaby, 2012). As the Thaayorre do not speak of future as westwards, this might be regarded as another example of how the idea of absolute references is transferred from space to time. 6.7. Aymara Aymara is one of the two languages that make up the Aru (or Jaqi) family, which—besides Quechua—is one of the two dominant language families of the central Andes in South America. Aymara is spoken by approximately 2.8 million people in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. For spatial descriptions on different scales, Aymara speakers make preferential use of an absolute FoR, which is based on the cardinal directions. Interestingly, aligned with this coordinate system is the intrinsic coordinate system emanating from the body, so that East is mapped onto ‘‘front’’ and West mapped onto ‘‘back’’. More generally, people, objects, and land are conceived of as having a canonical orientation Eastwards, facing the sunrise (Núñez & Cornejo, 2012). When talking about time, Aymara speakers have been observed to use both lateral and sagittal gesture: the former for depicting non-deictic time (i.e., earlier/later relations), and the latter for deictic time. In deictic gestures, FRONT is assigned to the past, and BACK to the future. In previous work, this was related to the VISION-IS-KNOWLEDGE metaphor and a focus on evidentiality, with what one can know (because of personal experience) as providing the basic motivation for the FRONT-to-past mapping (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). In the light of the new findings on preferred spatial orientation (Núñez & Cornejo, 2012), however, one might also argue that the canonical absolute orientation towards the sunrise provides the basis for the FRONT-to-past mapping (as both are located in the East). 6.8. Tzeltal and Yucatec Maya Tzeltal and Yucatec belong to two different branches of the Maya language family. Tzeltal is basically spoken in the highland of Chiapas (Mexico), Yucatec in the lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and northern Belize (approx. 370,000 and 770,000 speakers, respectively). For describing locations and movements in space, neither of these languages makes use of a full-fledged relative FoR. Tzeltal speakers prefer the absolute (geocentric) FoR, which derives its orientation from the overall

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downhill/uphill slope of the land, but they also make use of a body-based intrinsic FoR and its projections (Brown, 2012; Brown & Levinson, 1992; Levinson & Brown, 1994). Yucatec speakers, on the other hand, appear to prefer intrinsic references over absolute ones, based on cardinal directions (Bohnemeyer & Stolz, 2006; Le Guen, 2011a). Despite these diverging preferences, however, co-speech gesture is geocentrically anchored and geographically accurate in both groups (Brown, 2012; Le Guen, 2011a, 2011b; and see Haviland, 2003, 2005). More importantly, the two groups differ with regard to space–time mapping. Tzeltal provides a wide range of spatial expressions that can be mapped onto time, thus giving rise to a wide range of temporal representations, which include the following concepts: (1) deictically anchored (ego-centered) time vectors, (2) deictically anchored static sequences of time periods, (3) time as change of state or of location along a unidirectional time line, (4) time as a unidirectional vector oriented uphill-wards, and (5) cyclic time. The relationship between the two domains is therefore highly variable, and only occasionally is the future located according to an absolute FoR, namely uphill (Brown, 2012). Data collection with the time arrangement tasks (see Section 5.3.4) did not yield systematic patterns, either in the card arranging task or in the (2D) abstract time-points task. A slight majority in the latter for relative responses (prevailingly left-to-right, followed by near-to-far) rather indicates a preference for temporal representations, which is at odds with preferences for space. With regard to gesture, convergence across domains appears to be stronger: In line with the absolute FoR underlying spatial gestures, Tzeltal speakers routinely point to different positions in the sky to indicate where the sun would be. Occasionally, they also point back over the head or shoulder to indicate the past (Brown, 2012). In contrast, speakers of Yucatec Maya, who make more frequent use of an intrinsic FoR in speaking about space and of an absolute FoR in their co-speech gestures, avoid mappings of temporal entities onto any distinct space and thus tend to point towards the ground for the here and now, and upwards for distant past or future events. This resistance to cross-domain mappings is also observed in the time arrangement tasks, in which a substantial number of participants came up with a piling strategy: bottomup, so that the most recent one covers all of the older ones (Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012). 6.9. Amondawa Amondawa, finally, is a Kawahib language that belongs to the Tupí-Guaraní branch of the Tupí family. It is spoken by approximately 100 people living in the Uru-eu-wauwau reservation in Rondônia in Greater Amazonia (Brazil). Besides documentation of the diverse lexical and constructional repertoire for the conceptualization and expression of location and spatial motion (Sinha et al., 2011), data on frames of reference or co-speech gesture were not collected. Linguistic analyses show that none of the spatial expressions is used across domains to situate an event in relation to a temporal reference point, and no term for an

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abstract notion of time exists. Instead, temporal intervals such as those belonging to the seasonal and diurnal systems are expressed by sun-based terms. In three spatial layout tasks, this lack of space–time mapping at the constructional level was further explored. The two calendar installation tasks (Section 5.3.2) exhibited curvilinear representations, likely fitted into working space, which revealed no clear preference for either left-to-right (LR) or right-to-left (RL) orientation. The time landscape game produced expressions like ‘‘The sun/dry season goes’’, ‘‘. . . has passed across’’, or ‘‘. . . is coming’’, or ‘‘The night is coming behind [the sun]’’ (Sinha et al., 2011, p. 159). These expressions may be regarded as instantiations of linguistic space–time mappings. However, the authors consider this an unwarranted over-interpretation, as all of these expressions were elicited in situations that involve spatial motion (and non-deictic sequences). They conclude, instead, that Amondawa speakers do not conceptualize events as occurring in Time as Such, and that they do not employ expressions for spatial location and motion to construct temporal ones (Sinha et al., 2011). 7. Theoretical implications One of the main purposes of this review is to scrutinize the accounts of temporal frames of reference (FoRs) proposed to date in the light of the available empirical data. More precisely, we intend to investigate whether and how these data would be interpreted by each of these accounts, and whether and to what extent they are compatible with their theoretical predictions. To this end, we will now look at the empirical findings with the following questions in mind: Which properties and concepts of time are reflected in the observed cultural patterns (Section 7.1)? How do they relate to the construct of a mental time line (Section 7.2)? What do the observed concepts of time and the culture-specific mental time lines reveal about the principles of FoR construal and the psychological reality of the proposed temporal FoRs (Section 7.3)? And to what extent, and based on which grounds, are spatial FoRs really mapped onto time (Section 7.4)? 7.1. Properties and concepts of time In Section 2.1, we discussed the properties of time and how they may or may not be mapped onto space, and we identified possible concepts of time. Which of these properties are preserved, and which concepts are reflected in the space–time mappings reported for the sixteen languages described above? While these questions lie at the heart of our endeavor, they were addressed only indirectly by the studies reviewed here. Central to most of them is a concern with the mental time line, but, as we try to demonstrate, respective findings can be used to shed light on other questions as well. 7.1.1. Spatial and non-spatial properties of time The properties of time comprise extension, linearity, directionality, and transience (Galton, 2011). Three of these are largely preserved when time is spatialized. This

is most obvious for extension: Every spatial representation extends along at least one dimension. And for all but three of the examples mustered for this review, temporal data patterns do indeed reflect this property. Almost all of these also preserve the properties of linearity and directionality: Most representations seem to take the shape of a line and are oriented in one direction (with circles being looped lines, directed clockwise or counterclockwise). Direction, in turn, provides the foundation for assigning FRONT and is thus essential for construing temporal FoRs, as discussed below (Section 7.3). One of the cases that provide an exception to the preservation of spatio-temporal properties is Amondawa. Its speakers allegedly do not employ expressions for spatial location and/or motion when constructing temporal expressions (Sinha et al., 2011). The empirical data seem to contradict this claim, as they appear to reveal adoption of the lateral axis for temporal representations, but due to some of the specifics of the task and the small sample size, no solid inferences can be drawn. The other exceptions are Yucatec Maya, whose speakers avoid spatial mappings in gesture and who do not exhibit consistent patterning in spatial layout tasks (Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012; see Brown, 2012, for similar observations among Tzeltal Maya), and Yélî Dnye, for which space–time mapping is patchy in language, gesture, and behavioral tasks (Levinson & Majid, 2013). A final exception, which is not listed above but is recurrent in discussions on this topic, is Whorf’s claim that the Hopi do not conceptualize time as anything spatially extended, but as purely temporal: ‘‘Nothing is suggested about time except the perpetual ‘getting later’ of it’’ (1956, p. 143). Each of these exceptions may serve as instance of a cultural focus on the fourth property of time, its transience, which implies a change of state and the fleetingness of each single moment, meaning that it cannot be expressed spatially in any straightforward way. As most tasks involve a spatial dimension (especially those on bodily expressions, spatial layout, and congruency priming), empirical support for the absence of space–time mappings is hard to obtain—unless speakers shoulder the effort to avoid such mapping, as the Yucatec Maya appear to do (Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012). And yet, even some of the spatial data indicate transience more than any other property: It is reflected in the piling-up strategy during card arrangement, especially by Mayan speakers (Brown, 2012; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012), and in gestures that indicate time by pointing to the corresponding position of the sun in the sky (Brown, 2012; Gaby, 2012; Levinson & Majid, 2013; Sinha et al., 2011). 7.1.2. Concepts of time The concepts of time considered here include the linear, cyclical, and radial concept. As described in Section 2.1.2, all preserve—at least to some extent—the properties of extension, linearity, and directionality. The linear concept is typically considered to be the prevailing concept of time in human thinking, and the data compiled in Table 9 support this assumption: Spatial layout data reveal, in almost all cases, fairly straight, linear arrangements; to locate past and future, linguistic phrases

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employ dichotomous contrasts along a one-dimensional continuum; gesture and postural sway do the same; and congruency priming tasks found congruency effects along the same continua. The preponderance of the linear concept, however, does not preclude the existence of other concepts. For instance, our experience of recurring time periods and cyclical sequences may also motivate a cyclical concept of time. In the past, the cyclical concept has typically been associated with non-Western cultures such as Hinduism (Sharma, 1974), the Hopi (Malotki, 1983; Whorf, 1956), Maya (Farriss, 1987; León-Portilla, 1990) or South-American Toba (Klein, 1987)—and has given rise to a fair amount of controversy. Of the methods reviewed here, only the documentation of co-speech gesture and some of the spatial layout tasks are suitable for detecting such a cyclical concept in the first place. Respective data suggest that, although this concept may not be pervasive, it does exist; Tzeltal Maya (Brown, 2012) speak of time as cyclical; Bergen and Chan Lau (2012) report small proportions of cyclical arrangement of cards in P.R. China (3%) and Taiwan (8%); and Le Guen and Pool Balam (2012) found instantiations of the cyclical concept among the Yucatec Maya, both in spatial layout tasks (9%) and in gesture (46%). Notably, findings like these are not restricted to nonWestern cultures. For instance, Tversky, Kugelmass, and Winter (1991; see Section 5.3.1) report that 15–40% of the data for the youngest children and 6–25% for the older children consisted of nonlinear responses, including triangular (i.e., circular) instead of linear arrangements. And Jamalian and Tversky (2012) obtained 24% circular diagrams (in contrast to 67% linear diagrams) from English-speaking adults in a control condition, and even 67% circular diagrams in the condition with circular gesture. The radial (or ego-centric) concept, finally, stresses asymmetry between proximal and distal events more than asymmetry between past and future, thus emphasizing— and in fact presupposing—a deictic center. Radial patterns in space are far from unusual: They are characteristic of the relative FoR, with assignment of FRONT either nearer to Ego (reflection) or further away from Ego (translation), and even some absolute FoRs are based on radiality, especially those used on small islands (e.g., Bennardo, 2000, 2009). But how likely is a radial concept to emerge in the domain of time? Several pieces of the currently available data hint at such a possibility, each of which may appear weak in isolation but gain weight when considered jointly. Acknowledgement of its feasibility goes back at least to Traugott (1975, 1978), who defined tense in its simplest form as the distinction between proximal and distal relations and thus as symmetrical to the deictic center. The distinction between past and future requires an additional step—which is not taken by all languages—namely mapping the tense relations onto a time line. Conflation of distant past and future has also been described for Toba (Klein, 1987) and Yucatec Maya (Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012). When confronted with Wednesday’s meeting task, the majority of (older) speakers of Tongan tend to read ‘‘moved forward’’ as pastwards in the case of a past meeting, and as futurewards in the case of a future meeting

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(Bender et al., 2010). Such an ‘‘anthropocentric’’ view of time also shines through in English, with the observer ‘towering’ above both past and future (Radden, 2004). And the distance effect observed in congruency priming tasks by Santiago and colleagues (2010; see Section 5.4.6) demonstrates that proximal scenes are harder to discriminate from a reference scene than distal scenes—in either direction, regardless of past or future. It should also be noted that some of the data reported as evidence for a linear concept do not really allow a decision to be made between a linear and a radial concept, as the adopted axis begins or ends in Ego. This holds especially for data on the vertical (top/bottom) axis that should be more accurately coded as nearer/further (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; Tversky et al., 1991). The nearer/further axis is also employed in Tzeltal and Yucatec Mayan (Brown, 2012; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012). 7.2. The mental time line Recent years have seen accumulating evidence for the proposition that people process a variety of abstract information such as number, size, speed, or time by mapping it onto a linear spatial representation (Walsh, 2003). The mental time line, a construct widely discussed in this domain, is assumed to extend in a more or less spatial manner, along one dimension, in one direction, and potentially ad infinitum. This notion reflects three of the four properties of time, namely extension, linearity, and directionality, and is compatible with a linear concept of time. As detailed in the previous subsection, however, some of the observed representations are at odds with the time line construct and indicate that it may not be universal (the same has been claimed for the related mental number line; see Bender & Beller, 2011; Núñez, 2008, 2011; Núñez, Doan, & Nikoulina, 2011). The cyclical concept of time preserves the properties of extension, linearity, and direction only to some extent, namely if transitivity is suspended (Galton, 2011). And the radial concept entirely precludes the existence of a single mental time line, as its half-axes radiate out from the deictic center, thus pointing in diametrically opposed directions. Even those data, however, that do support the mental time line construct exhibit remarkable variation, and they do so with regard to (i) the number of available different time lines, (ii) their dimension and direction, and (iii) their anchoring. 7.2.1. Number of time lines Apparently, most people do not possess exactly one time line. Some, like the Yucatec Maya or Amondawa, are claimed to possess none at all (Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012; Sinha et al., 2011), while others appear to have at least two (Miles et al., 2011) or even three, if one takes the data from Mandarin speakers (compiled in Table 9) as evidence for alternative recruitment of the sagittal, lateral, and vertical axis. 7.2.2. Dimension and direction of the time line Variability is also profound with regard to the preferred axis and direction of the time line. One of the first investigations into space–time mappings found an LR preference

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in English, but the reverse in Arabic and Hebrew speakers (Tversky et al., 1991). Ever since then it has been assumed by psychologists—and recurrently demonstrated for a number of languages—that the mental time line basically unfolds along the lateral axis (e.g., Ouellet et al., 2010a, 2010b; Santiago et al., 2007, 2010; Ulrich & Maienborn, 2010; Weger & Pratt, 2008). This assumption contrasted sharply with the linguistic emphasis of the sagittal axis (again across a range of languages), supported by data on bodily expressions (Miles et al., 2010) and from congruency priming tasks that permitted sagittal responses (e.g., Torralbo et al., 2006; Ulrich et al., 2012). Evidence for the third dimension along the vertical axis comes from speakers of Chinese languages (Tables 9 and 10). Interestingly, the direction of time lines is not conventionalized to the same extent for all three dimensions. The direction of the lateral axis appears to be non-controversial, as it basically corresponds to the prevailing writing direction (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Ouellet et al., 2010b; Tversky et al., 1991). The vertical axis appears to be pointing uniformly downwards (UD). The two instances of upwards direction (DU) reported in Table 9 (i.e., Tzeltal and Yucatec Maya) are convincingly explained as representations of temporal transience rather than spatial orientation (Brown, 2012; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012). Only the sagittal axis may be oriented both ways (FB or BF), within and across speech communities, as attested to in linguistic tasks (e.g., Clark, 1973; McGlone & Harding, 1998; Rothe-Wulf, Beller, & Bender, 2014) and co-speech gesture (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012)—likely a reflection of the two complementary perspectives on time (ME and MT). In at least four of the cases compiled in Table 9, however, none of these dimensions appears to be relevant for the time line. Instead, speakers recruit geographical coordinates for its construals: the inclination of the landscape, with uphill/downhill contrasts as in Tzeltal Maya (Brown, 2012), the flowing direction of a prominent river as in Yupno (Núñez et al., 2012) and other Papuan languages (Fedden & Boroditsky, 2012), or the course of the sun from East to West as in Thaayorre (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Gaby, 2012), Yélî Dnye (Levinson & Majid, 2013), and perhaps Aymara (Núñez & Cornejo, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). This raises the question of where the time line is anchored, or grounded.

7.2.3. Anchoring and grounding: Egocentric versus allocentric time lines A time line may be classified as egocentric if it is anchored in Ego (i.e., it takes the speaker as the reference point or deictic center), whereas an allocentric time line has its origin in an entity distinct from Ego. In this sense, postural sway during a mental time travel into one’s own past or future clearly reveals an egocentric time line (Miles et al., 2010). The speech balloon task with a person’s head as the reference point, in contrast, reveals an allocentric time line (Torralbo et al., 2006). In a similar fashion, some of the spatial layout tasks provide a reference point outside the speaker (Boroditsky et al., 2008; Tversky et al., 1991), and so do some of the congruency priming tasks (Miles et al., 2011; Torralbo et al., 2006; Ulrich et al., 2012).

A related, yet broader distinction based on grounding principles is proposed by Núñez and colleagues (2012). They classify a time line as egocentric if it is grounded in the asymmetries of the conceptualizing Ego (such as back/front, up/down, or left/right), whereas an allocentric time line is grounded in the superordinate field. Interestingly, only very few data patterns unequivocally attest to a time line that extends literally through the speaker: linguistic mapping on front/back vocabulary (e.g., McGlone & Harding, 1998), some gestures that explicate backward as over the head or shoulder (Brown, 2012; Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006), and forward/backward postural sway (Miles et al., 2010). As in most of these cases representations were linked to participants’ subjective past or future, the egocentric nature of these representations is beyond question. The only other type of representations for which this is the case is that based on the radial concept of time, which is egocentric by definition. On the other end of the spectrum, Yupno and Kuuk Thaayorre (as well as, to some extent, Yélî Dnye, Tzeltal and Aymara) provide examples for temporal construals that are undoubtedly allocentric. Regardless of how the speaker is oriented, his or her time line is oriented towards a distinct, external coordinate such as East/West or downstream/upstream (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Núñez et al., 2012; and see Fedden & Boroditsky, 2012). It happens to pass through Ego, but is not emanating from it. For the bulk of data, however, this classification is not easy to make. As time is one-dimensional, thus comprising the speaker in each stream of events, even time lines that are not egocentric likely appear to be so. Most studies compiled in this review take the participant as point of origin. It may thus be a mere artifact that time line representations appear to be egocentric at all. The question of how accurate it is to classify a mental time line as egocentric—simply because it comprises the speaker—is related to the question discussed above (in Sections 2.2.2 and 4.1) of whether the ME and MT perspective are indeed necessarily ego-centered or simply happen to include Ego, and thus has a direct bearing on FoR assignment as will be detailed in the next section. 7.3. Temporal frames of reference Section 2.2.3 introduced the notion of frames of reference (FoRs) as one possibility for structuring spatio-temporal representations, and Section 3 presented a range of diverging theoretical accounts that are based on this notion. This current section is devoted to the question of how the empirical data may inform the evaluation of these accounts, by discussing (i) what the observed concepts of time and the culture-specific mental time lines reveal about the principles of FoR construal and assignment of orientation, (ii) how they speak to the psychological reality of the proposed temporal FoRs, and (iii) whether they support a fundamental role for deixis. 7.3.1. Principles of FoR construal and FRONT assignment As detailed above, the three basic FoRs—absolute, intrinsic, and relative—are construed (and can be distinguished)

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largely on the basis of the following principles: The absolute and intrinsic FoR describe binary relations (between figure F and ground G), the relative FoR a ternary relation (between F, G, and observer’s viewpoint V); and orientation is derived in the case of the absolute FoR from the superordinate field (outside F and G), in the case of the intrinsic FoR from G, and in the case of the relative FoR from V. As a consequence, the relative FoR tends to be egocentric, and the other two tend to be allocentric. The possible concepts of time relate to these principles in two ways. First, both the linear and the cyclical concept are one-dimensional and unidirectional representations of time that, from a mathematical point of view, require only two points for precise definition. In other words, they afford construal of binary relations and thus an absolute or intrinsic FoR (and are therefore unlikely to be Ego-centered). The radial concept, on the other hand, not only introduces a deictic center, but also presupposes its consideration for establishing the ternary relation between three points (whether F is in front of G depends on where exactly V is in relation to F and G). In this sense, only the radial concept affords a relative FoR. Second, the concepts of time also provide orientation for the construal of FoRs: Whereas the radial concept defines Ego as the deictic center, thereby establishing the subjective perspective required for a relative FoR, the direction assigned to the linear (and, to some extent, the cyclical) concept reflects the conceptualization of where time is generally flowing to, thus bestowing an orientation upon the superordinate field required for an absolute FoR (this argument corresponds to the proposition above that neither the ME nor MT perspective presuppose a deictic center, but reflect more general perspectives on time, and thus do not qualify as instances of a relative FoR). Accordingly, orientation of the relative FoR is easy to establish, as it simply derives from the deictic center of the radial concept (typically the speaker). In line with the arguments put forward for the existence of a radial concept of time (Section 7.1.2), the following cases could be enlisted as examples of a relative FoR: languages with proximal/distal distinction only (Traugott, 1975, 1978), the conflation of (distant) past and future in Toba and Yucatec Maya (Klein, 1987; Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012), indications of an anthropocentric perspective on time in English and in French generational terms (Radden, 2004), and the symmetrical forward movement of dates away from now in Tongan (Bender et al., 2010). All of these cases attest to the possibility of relative FoRs in the domain of time—contrary to claims by Moore (2011) and Tenbrink (2011), but in line with the accounts of Kranjec (2006) and Zinken (2010). These cases also afford, at least in principle, the two variants reflection and translation as proposed by Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010, 2012): The French generational terms both for great-grandchildren and great-grandparents as ‘‘behind’’ (Radden, 2004) instantiate the reflection variant, and the Tongan moving pattern away from Ego the translation variant. Establishing orientation of the absolute and intrinsic FoR is less straightforward, and more controversial. In order to be diagnosed as absolute, external coordinates need to be recruited for FoR construal. Some of the

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cases compiled in Table 9 are obvious candidates for this: the mapping of past events downhill (or rather downstream) and future events uphill (upstream) in Yupno (Núñez et al., 2012) and, to some extent, Tzeltal (Brown, 2012), and the mapping of past events to East and future events to West in Kuuk Thaayorre (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Gaby, 2012) and perhaps Aymara (Núñez & Cornejo, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). However, even speakers who do not invoke geographical coordinates may adopt an absolute FoR, for instance when aligning their mental time line with the arrow of time (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Yu, 2012). If time is assumed to ‘flow’ or ‘fly’ from the past into the future, and speakers are assumed to be oriented in line with this direction of time, then assignment of FRONT to the future would count as an instance of the absolute FoR (as proposed by Bender et al., 2005, 2010; Kranjec, 2006). Likewise, arrangement of tokens along the lateral axis from left to right would count as an instance of the absolute FoR if the rationale for the arrangement is that the past is located left on the time axis, and the future towards the right (in marked contrast to arrangements based on sequential, anterior/posterior relations, according to which earlier times should be mapped to the left side). In this sense, almost all instances of mental time lines would, in fact, qualify as representations of the same temporal orientation, with almost all of the cases compiled in Table 9 being then classified as instantiations of an absolute FoR. A third possibility put forward by Zinken (2010) is to consider the superordinate field as being oriented towards the beginning of temporal intervals and, ultimately, the beginning of time itself. Adoption of this view appears to be reflected in FB gestures (as reported by Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012) and linguistic mapping along the FB axis (as obtained with the Wednesday’s meeting task). The intrinsic FoR, finally, is anchored in the ground entity G and can only be adopted if G is regarded as being oriented. Crucially, a potential observer may also serve as ground, which requires the distinction of two cases: anchoring of the FoR in event G, and anchoring of the FoR in Ego (= G). Unfortunately, no consensus has been reached as to whether temporal entities may or may not be regarded as oriented. This controversy is most explicit for events, but can also be generalized to the apparently simpler case of Ego = G. As detailed in Section 4.2.2, some scholars (e.g., Tenbrink, 2011; Zinken, 2010) assume that the intrinsic FRONT in this case is derived from Ego’s looking direction, which in most cases is futurewards. However, as we argued above (Section 4.4), what would serve as G in temporal contexts is not Ego as a person, but his or her subjective present, and whether this specific moment in time can be assigned an intrinsic FRONT—and, if so, towards which direction—depends on the more general question of whether temporal entities may have an intrinsic FRONT in the first place. Whereas Tenbrink (2011) claims this to be impossible, Zinken (2010) is prepared to assign an intrinsic FRONT at least to temporal intervals, and Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010) as well as Yu (2012) assign an intrinsic FRONT (= their ‘‘beginning’’) to all temporal entities. Combinations of a linear concept with assignment of FRONT to earlier times—reflected in all cases recruiting the FB axis—thus

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appear to be a likely candidate for the diagnosis of an intrinsic FoR. In any case, the problem remains that different accounts classify the same patterns as instances of diverging FoRs. The classification of absolute and intrinsic FoRs by Tenbrink (2011) and see Moore, 2011, for instance, is diametrically opposed to that by Kranjec (2006) or Bender and colleagues (2005, 2010). However, whether time lines oriented pastwards really reflect adoption of an absolute FoR and time lines oriented futurewards reflect adoption of an intrinsic FoR cannot be decided on theoretical grounds, as different speech communities may differ in the principles on which they base their assignment of orientation. Fortunately, some priming studies explicitly aimed to test the psychological reality of these FoRs and may thus shed light on this infelicitous situation. 7.3.2. The psychological reality of temporal FoRs As mentioned earlier, the Wednesday’s meeting question was primarily used to explore the psychological reality of specific perspectives that people are claimed to take while processing ambiguous temporal phrases. The perspective under scrutiny is typically primed before participants are asked to answer the target question. Of the accounts described in Section 3, only three attempted to empirically test the space–time mapping they claim and the psychological reality of any additional perspective or FoR predicted by them (details in Section 5.1.3). Two of them are relevant here. The reference-point (RP) metaphors account (Núñez et al., 2006; see Section 3.2) predicts an Ego-free MT [= intrinsic] perspective (indicative of the ‘‘Time-RP’’ metaphor) in contradistinction to the ‘‘Ego-RP’’ metaphor, which is regarded as consisting of the ME and an Ego-centered MT perspective. To enforce such an Ego-free MT perspective, visual primes were used that foregrounded the anterior/posterior relation between two events. Compared to a control condition, this priming significantly shifted participants’ responses to the earlier date (52% [n = 50] vs. 71% [n = 45 speakers of US English] in Exp. 2; in Exp. 1 without control condition, Monday was chosen by 64%, n = 66 speakers of US English). The temporal framework models account (Kranjec, 2006; see Section 3.3) predicts an additional ‘‘extrinsic’’ [= absolute] FoR. To enforce this FoR, visual primes were used that foregrounded the superordinate field: In two experiments, the priming shifted responses to the later date (Friday: 73%, aggregated across experiments, combined n = 44 speakers of US English). In contrast, priming them with intrinsic stimuli (similar to the ones by Núñez et al., 2006) reversed the pattern (Monday: 61%, n.s.; n = 36 speakers of US English). These findings provide empirical support for two important propositions: First, they do attest to effects of spatial priming on temporal reasoning and thus to space– time mapping in the context of references. Second, and more importantly, they demonstrate that an absolute (spatial) FoR leads to assigning FRONT futurewards, and an intrinsic FoR leads to assigning FRONT pastwards (in the direction of earlier events). In other words: The empirical data support those accounts that classify futureward

movements as an indication of an absolute FoR, and pastward movements as an indication of an intrinsic FoR (i.e., Bender et al., 2010; Kranjec, 2006; Núñez et al., 2006; see Table 7). This classification also entails that, of the time lines compiled in Table 9, those unfolding in LR, BF, and UD direction are likely to favor the absolute FoR.

7.3.3. The role of deixis The preponderance of the absolute FoR for temporal representations across tasks is at odds with the claim that deictic representations differ fundamentally from nondeictic representations. As described above, almost all accounts of temporal FoRs take deixis as their point of departure. They construe their taxonomies from the basic distinction between expressions that do (A-series) or do not (B-series) entail Ego as a deictic center. Quite frequently, deictic A-series expressions are equated with a relative temporal FoR, and with the ME perspective—as this appears to also presuppose a deictic center, the (moving) Ego—and, in some accounts, an Ego-centered MT perspective. Conversely, non-deictic B-series expressions are equated with an Ego-free MT perspective, and either with an intrinsic or absolute temporal FoR. As argued in Section 4.1, however, this focus on deixis may obscure the more complex relations between the A-/B-series classification and a FoR-based classification, and may incite hasty mappings. The crucial role for the unfolding of the time line and for preferences in temporal references that has been ascribed to deixis is challenged both on theoretical and empirical grounds. Theoretically, deixis reveals only little about the adopted FoR. Whereas adoption of a relative FoR does presuppose a subjective point of view (typically, although not necessarily, the speaker), adoption of a non-relative FoR does not preclude the presence of the speaker. In other words, descriptions can be non-relative, regardless of whether Ego is or is not part of the scene. The non-relative relationship between Monday and Tuesday (as depicted in Fig. 1 and Table 4), holds regardless of whether one is aware of or oblivious to the fact that Monday coincides with Ego’s today. Especially in one-dimensional ‘spaces’ like time, Ego’s alignment with a sequence of events is difficult to elude. This is nicely illustrated by co-speech gestures, produced by speakers of Yupno, which appear to be speaker-centered and yet depict a general, non-relative perspective on time as moving upstream into the future (Núñez et al., 2012). What counts in terms of the classification of a FoR as relative is not whether it reveals the speaker’s position, or passes through it, but whether it is anchored in and emanating from this position. As a consequence, both the ME and MT perspective on time may also afford a more general and inherently nondeictic view on temporal moving: MT reflects a perspective on time as moving not only towards Ego, but towards temporal entities and events more generally (in most cases pastwards); and ME reflects a perspective according to which not only Ego, but temporal entities and events more generally are moving through time (in most cases futurewards). For the time being, this account of the temporal perspectives is afforded by the empirical data on temporal references and

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space–time mappings, but whether it will stand up to more conclusive scrutiny remains an open question. Empirical data that could illuminate the role of deixis are scarce and ambiguous. Some studies seem to confirm that mental representations may indeed differ substantially depending on whether they refer to deictic or nondeictic time. Specifically in co-speech gestures, people tend to recruit the sagittal axis for deictic, and the lateral axis for non-deictic expressions (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Emmorey, 2002; Núñez et al., 2012). However, the story must be more complicated, as the very same (deictic) stimuli may trigger diverging axis preferences, depending on other context factors (Torralbo et al., 2006). And conversely, both types of stimuli (non-deictic as in the card arranging task vs. deictic as in the time-points task, Section 5.3.4) may yield the same type of results (e.g., Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010). It is also worth noting that, despite the preference for the lateral axis to express sequence time, this does not involve FRONT-to-past mapping (as in ‘‘earlier times’’ before ‘‘later times’’), but the opposite direction (with FRONT in the future direction). In other words, both sagittal and lateral axis reveal an absolute FoR. A more comprehensive explanation for the observed variability across contexts may thus be that speakers of most languages have more than one axis readily available for temporal representation and reference, and simply prefer the one that is most compatible with their mindset, with task specifics, and with contextual factors, which may—but need not—involve consideration of deictic versus non-deictic aspects.

7.4. Extent of space–time mapping If our analysis of FoR construals is correct, then one surprising inference is that the majority of cases compiled in Table 9 favor adoption of an absolute FoR. Exceptions include a few cases of refusal to spatialize time at all (i.e., Amondawa and Yucatec Maya), a few cases of adopting the radial concept and concomitantly a genuinely relative FoR (like Toba and, to some extent, perhaps Yucatec Maya and older speakers of Tongan), and a few cases of adopting the intrinsic FoR (as indicated by the occasional occurrence of the FB time line). Based on this classification, even the apparently inconsistent responses of Tzeltal Maya (Brown, 2012) and Yélî Dnye (Levinson & Majid, 2013) would be considered coherently absolute (except for the piling-up strategy): LR and NF reflect a lateral and sagittal line, respectively, aligned to the flow of time, while East/ West and downhill/uphill recruit external coordinates, but for the same purpose. Instead of inconsistency in preferences for temporal FoRs, the data thus reveal inconsistency in how these temporal FoRs are represented in space—which may not be as surprising, given the lack of cultural conventions for space–time mappings. Despite converging on the absolute FoR, however, a great deal of diversity is discerned in how these absolute FoRs are instantiated, and this raises two important questions: What motivates the specifics of each of these FoRs, and to what extent do preferences for a specific FoR in the domain of time reflect preferences in space?

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7.4.1. Sources for space–time mapping At least four possible sources for space–time mapping have been discussed in the literature: cultural artifacts such as writing direction, linguistic metaphors, embodied representations of motion, and principles of FoR construal. Initial research on how spatial representations affect temporal ones unearthed the importance of cultural artifacts: People’s mental time line turned out to be correlated with the prevailing writing direction (Tversky et al., 1991). Subsequent studies confirmed this impact of writing direction (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012; Casasanto & Bottini, 2010; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; de Sousa, 2012; Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010; Ouellet et al., 2010b), and hinted at related factors such as musical notation, the time axis of graphs, or the design of calendars and clocks10 (Galton, 2011; Jamalian & Tversky, 2012). That language itself may serve as a principal source for space–time mappings is as obvious as it is wrong, at least as a general rule. Adoption of the sagittal axis BF is in line with respective linguistic metaphors that put the past behind the speaker and the future ahead. Likewise, an additional vertical time line in speakers of Mandarin may (also) be derived from vertical expressions and may be in place even in the absence of vertical writing (Fuhrman et al., 2011; Miles et al., 2011). And speakers of Tzeltal Maya occasionally point to the future as uphill in a way akin to how they may refer to it verbally (Brown, 2012). And yet, most non-linguistic data on temporal representations, at least in the Western world, indicate a lateral axis LR for which there is no linguistic equivalent (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Cooperrider & Núñez, 2009). Likewise, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre do not speak of the future as ‘‘westwards’’ (Gaby, 2012), and speakers of Yupno do not really speak of it as ‘‘upstream’’ (Núñez et al., 2012). An alternative explanation of this preference for the sagittal axis focuses on embodied representations of motion and/or vision. When walking, places to be reached in the future are lying ahead, and previously visited ones are behind, thus providing strong associations of future with FRONT, and past with BACK (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; and see Miles et al., 2010). Notably, this imagined motion may also give rise to the reversed pattern (of mapping FRONT to the past). And in Aymara, the (known) past is indeed regarded as in front and the unknown as in back of Ego (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006; for claims of similar FRONT-to-past mappings in Malagasy, Toba, and Maori, see Dahl, 1995; Klein, 1987; Thornton, 1987, respectively). A fourth possible source for space–time mappings are the principles of FoR construals themselves (Bender et al.,

10 If cyclical representations are simply triggered by a cyclical concept of time, there is no reason to assume a specific direction (clockwise or counterclockwise); if, however, they are (also) affected by the canonical direction of clocks, they should be oriented clockwise only. Unfortunately, not all cyclical concepts found in previous research were systematically analyzed (e.g., Tversky et al., 1991). The available data, however, support the assumption: Cyclical representations produced by Chinese participants are oriented exclusively clockwise (Bergen & Chan Lau, 2012), whereas those produced by (non-literate) Yucatec Maya exhibit an almost equal number of clockwise and counterclockwise directions (Le Guen & Pool Balam, 2012).

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2010), which appear to highlight the exact same external coordinates for the absolute references among speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010; Gaby, 2012), Yupno (Núñez et al., 2012), or—albeit to a lesser extent—Tzeltal Maya (Brown, 2012). Alternative availability of these different sources for space–time mappings may be what allows people to adopt more than one such representation in parallel (e.g., Miles et al., 2011; Torralbo et al., 2006). It also explains why the direction of time lines is not conventionalized to the same extent for all three dimensions, with the lateral and vertical axis being significantly more uniform than the sagittal axis (which may be oriented both ways, FB or BF, within and across speech communities). Importantly, most of these sources favor an absolute FoR: The mental time line fostered by the prevailing writing direction, a substantial number of linguistic metaphors, and people’s looking direction and imagined motion all more or less reflect (or are aligned to) the general flow of time, thus foregrounding the orientation of the superordinate field (Table 11). The only source that does not seem to favor one particular FoR over any other are the principles of FoR construal. These would predict that, whatever FoR people prefer in one domain should also be preferred in the other (Bender et al., 2010). Is this prediction confirmed by the data? 7.4.2. Degree of space–time mapping Based on the assumption that (unidirectional) mental time lines attest to an absolute FoR, we re-coded the data from Table 9, and contrasted them with preferences for spatial FoRs where available. Results are summarized in Table 11. The mere fact that absolute FoRs appear to prevail in the languages under scrutiny already hints at the conclusion that FoR preferences may not carry over from space to time. In only very few of these cases (including Yupno, Yélî Dnye, Thaayorre, and to some extent the two Maya groups) do speech communities favor the absolute FoR in small-scale space; more often, they prefer the relative and/or intrinsic FoR. Given the somewhat tentative classification of temporal representations as instantiations of one or another FoR, however, this inference may be too hasty. Furthermore, the

flexibility of temporal representations depending on task design, material, and other context factors—together with a similar flexibility of FoR adoption in spatial tasks—forbids simple comparisons across diverse tasks. An explicit empirical assessment of cross-domain consistency in FoR adoption has only been attempted by a small number of studies to date. The authors of the t-FoR account (Bender et al., 2005, 2010; see Section 3.6), which distinguishes four different FoRs, assumed that—specifically in the case of the two relative FoR variants—preferences should carry over from space to time. Comparing speakers of US English, German, Mandarin, and Tongan in a language elicitation study with the Wednesday’s meeting task, they found a substantial proportion of relative FoR adoption in only one of the languages under scrutiny (i.e., among older speakers of Tongan), and the variant used in time (i.e., translation) was identical to the one preferred in space (Bennardo, 2000). For the other three languages, the observed temporal FoRs were not incompatible with those available for space, but did not reflect the preferred ones either (Bender et al., 2010). A follow-up study attempted to bring the spatial condition more in line with the temporal one by replacing the static task with a task on object movements. Still, responses from speakers of the same four languages did not indicate cross-domain consistency in FoRs. Notably, correlation between spatial and temporal FoRs among the US participants, who had worked on both tasks sequentially, was close to zero (Bender et al., 2012). And finally, Rothe-Wulf and colleagues (2014; see Section 5.1.3) tested with speakers of US English, Swedish, and German whether adoption of a temporal FoR could be primed by spatial FoRs. They found that only a minor proportion of speakers of only one of the three languages under scrutiny seemed to be susceptible to this priming in the predicted direction. These findings are compatible with the observation that speakers do not necessarily base their mapping on the same principles: While speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre or Yupno appear to take principles of FoR construal as a rationale for mapping an absolute FoR from space onto time, this is obviously not the case with speakers of languages such as English or German, who prefer a relative FoR in space, but the absolute FoR in time.

Table 11 Evidence for preferred FoRs in space (s-FoR) and time (t-FoR), based on findings as reported in Section 6 and Table 9 (for classification of patterns into FoRs, see previous subsection).

Note. The following abbreviations are used: A = absolute, I = intrinsic, and R = relative FoR; subscript letters indicate the type of representation, for which this FoR is preferred (G = gesture, L = linguistic, nd = non-deictic, d = deictic). Preferred FoRs are printed bold-faced; FoRs in brackets are possible, but rarely used; entries in gray indicate likely, but unconfirmed preferences; shaded cells indicate lacking data.

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8. Conclusion The conceptual relations of space and time are manifold and complex. Time and space share four properties to varying extents. Some of the speech communities included in this review are reported to emphasize the least shared property transience and thus to avoid space–time mappings entirely. Most others, however, use spatialized representations of time that exhibit the shared properties extension, linearity, and direction. These representations reflect three different spatial concepts of time (most frequently the linear concept, but occasionally also the cyclical or radial concept), which favors the selection of a specific temporal FoR by defining a coordinate system, its anchoring, and its orientation. Unfortunately, theoretical accounts on temporal FoRs diverge broadly in how they conceptualize and distinguish temporal FoRs—depending, for instance, on what may count as the superordinate field, whether events may have an intrinsic FRONT, or how a deictic center may affect referencing patterns. Of the thirty studies scrutinized for confirming or disconfirming evidence, only very few address this issue directly. They suggest that the absolute FoR does derive its orientation from concepts such as the arrow of time, to which the mental time line is aligned in almost all cases. The intrinsic FoR, in contrast, is anchored in a temporal interval or event serving as ground that derives its orientation from assignment of FRONT to the beginning of temporal intervals and events or from the anteriority/ posteriority relation inherent in their sequence. While these two FoRs are fostered by the linear or cyclical concept, the relative FoR is compatible with a radial concept only: It presupposes a subjective viewpoint (or deictic center) and pertains to ternary relations. Based on this classification, the empirical data, with few exceptions, suggest a preponderance of the absolute FoR in the temporal domain, but also attest to an amazing variety in how this FoR is instantiated. To assign orientation to the superordinate field, some speech communities recruit external (allocentric) coordinates such as the position of the sun or the gradient of landscape or rivers, while others use the arrow of time in a more abstract manner. This is reflected in a variety of dimensions and directions, along which the mental time line unfolds: sagittally BF or FB (in line with the direction of looking and moving), laterally LR or RL (depending on writing direction), vertically UD (triggered variably by writing direction and/or perhaps linguistic metaphors), and even cyclically in either of two directions (depending on familiarity with clocks). In contrast to the FoRs based on geographical coordinates, these time lines might appear to be egocentric as they comprise the speaker and are construed relative to his or her position. As argued above, however, even these time lines should be considered allocentric in the sense that their orientation is derived from the direction into which time ‘flows’ rather than from a subjective perspective of the speaker. To assess the validity of this proposal, more systematic and empirical research is imperative. The diversity in time lines, which reveal the tendency to spatialize time, reflects the flexibility with which this can

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be achieved—not only across speech communities, but also within them, and even within individual speakers. The actual shape of the time line (if one is adopted at all) seems to depend on contextual factors, task specifics, and mindset. This flexibility is less surprising, if one considers that time is not only one-dimensional and unidirectional, but also orthogonal to all spatial dimensions. Which spatial dimension is actually adopted to convey the flow of time therefore does not really matter, as long as its basic properties are preserved. The fact that this may request compliance to cultural conventions, in order to be understood in the intended sense, explains why explicit tendencies are found in some speech communities and for some dimensions, but not others. The preponderance of the absolute FoR in the temporal domain (at least in the data compiled here) contrasts sharply with a more diverse pattern in the spatial domain. Only a small number of studies found cross-domain consistency in FoR adoption, but this is typically the case in those speech communities with an almost exclusive preference for the absolute spatial FoR. Does this devalue our efforts to systematize the mapping of spatial frames of reference onto time, which motivated this review? We are convinced that, on the contrary, the conclusions of our review render such an endeavor even more essential. Not only do informative cross-domain comparisons presuppose a consistent and comprehensive mapping of FoR taxonomies; without consensus on what exactly may count as a frame of reference, according to which principles they should be defined and construed, and how respective data should be interpreted, this field of research will not advance, and will be unable to contribute to fundamental theoretical questions on temporal cognition.

Acknowledgements The writing of this article took place during our stay at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld and was supported by a Heisenberg Fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (Be 2451/8-1,2) to Andrea Bender and by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG for the project on ‘‘Spatial referencing across languages: Cultural preferences and cognitive implications’’ to Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller (Be 2451/13-1, Be 2178/7-1). We are indebted to Susanne Bubser for support with the literature, to Gunter Senft for valuable comments on a previous version of the paper, and to Sarah Mannion de Hernandez for proofreading. This paper is dedicated to Melissa Bowerman, in appreciation of her scientific support and personal friendship.

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