earticle

영어

This paper aims to investigate whether our thought about fictive motion (FM) can influence our understanding of metaphorical expressions about time in English and Korean. Two experiments showed that FM sentences including an explicit direction can influence the way Korean people think about time, but FM sentences including no explicit direction can’t. Specifically the proportion of responses differed reliably from chance (i.e., 50% Monday, 50% Friday) in the FM condition coming toward participants (e.g., “The road goes all the way from Seoul”), but not in the FM condition going away from participants (e.g., “The road goes all the way to Seoul”). The results indicate that FM sentences including an explicit direction can influence temporal reasoning and hence Korean people are strongly biased toward time-moving perspective. I suggest that the results of two experiments should come from the facts that FM sentences including no explicit direction are unclear whether they are priming ego-moving or time-moving perspectives and Korean people are familiar with time-moving sentences in everyday language. Based on the results, I conclude that FM including an explicitly stated direction (toward or away) can influence Korean people’s understanding of time.