Temporality in Chinese: A Semantic Co-relation Perspective

Is Chinese a spatial language, temporal language or a space/time-conflation language? This has been argued quite extensively. In order to have a better and comprehensive understanding of the space-time issue in Chinese, it is quite necessary to distinguish the following distinct concepts:nominal spatiality vs. verbal temporality, the extended conceptualization of time-space-conflation; the character's graphic configuration vs. word, word cluster and clause structure; the linguistic expression vs. the semantic co-relation; natural temporal order vs. conventional temporal order. Different conclusions would be drawn with respect to the foci on different research facets, or the starting points from which certain studies are initiated. A semantic-co-relation-based study of Chinese would show that prominent temporal traits can be found in such structures as compounds, modifier-core structures, verb-resultative constructions, binomials, subordinate clauses and run-on sentences. These are further proofs to support the claim that Chinese is a language of higher iconicity, and typical of thinking in terms of temporality.