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Space and time are the two central and closely related domains of human cognition. While our embodied spatial experience is considered as relatively more concrete and perceptually richer, time and accordingly, temporal understanding is abstract and elusive in nature. When speaking about abstract concepts such as time, love or life, language users refer to metaphors from more concrete domains (Claudi & Heine, 1986; Jackendoff, 1985; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Decades of research has reliably documented that reasoning and speaking about time is heavily grounded in the concrete experience of space and spatial motion but not vice-versa, suggesting an asymmetrical relation between space and time (e.g., Boroditsky, 2011; Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008; Clark, 1973; Traugott, 1975). Well-established conceptual metaphors such as TIME IS SPACE, TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT, PAST IS BEHIND, NOW IS HERE, and FUTURE IS AHEAD forge the metaphorical links between spatial and temporal dimensions in language production (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Within the framework of such spatiotemporal metaphors, words with primarily spatial meanings such as in, next, behind, away, long or arrive etc. are often used to communicate the occurrence, sequence, and duration of temporal events (Majid et al., 2013; Tsung & Wu, 2021). For instance, next is referring to a static location in “The pencil is next to the cup”; yet, it is depicting a temporal sequence in “next week” relative to a temporal landmark (i.e., the present moment, that is, this week). Similarly, “The new year is coming up” (moving time) or “We are approaching the new year” (moving ego) involve a metaphorical understanding of time as a horizontal line in space (cf., Yu, 1998), which entails a linear concept of time. A plethora of studies in several, distinct language families such as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetian, Japonic, Austronesian, Papuan, Niger-Congo, Mayan, Aymaran, and Tupian among others has demonstrated that overall, linguistic space-time mapping is remarkably widespread transcending geographical, linguistic, and cultural borders (Bender & Beller, 2014; Haspelmath, 1997; Levinson, 2003; Nunez & Cooperrider, 2013). The crucial question is thus the extent and the scope of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variability in the spatialisation of time (see Sinha & Bernárdez, 2015). Against this background, Turkish remains a critically understudied language in terms of space-time mapping. Previous studies have examined spatiotemporal language in Turkish Sign Language and co-speech gestures (e.g., Arik, 2012), from a developmental perspective (e.g., Özçalışkan, 2008), within a synonymy set referring time (i.e., vakit and zaman) (Ördem, 2015), and in literary works of a specific author (in Uzbek within Turkic language family) (Gen, 2015). A systematic corpus-based study on the temporal extension of spatial structures in Turkish has yet to be conducted. The current study aims to fill this gap by investigating spatial categories referring to time in Turkish in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural fashion. More specifically, it aims to verify whether the asymmetric relationship between space and time extends to Turkish, with a particular emphasis on mental/metaphorical time orientation (e.g., linear, cyclical, radial etc.) and spatial/temporal frames of reference (i.e., moving time, moving ego etc.).
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