Perspectives in motion: The case of metaphorical temporal statements in Spanish

Interpreting temporal statements involves adopting alternative frames of reference. Previous work has shown that people draw on time-moving or ego-moving perspectives to interpret statements such as Next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days. The expression move forward in English can be translated into Spanish as mover hacia adelante or adelantar. Corpus data show that when these expressions are used metaphorically to describe time, the former is typically used to describe events parting from the ego (ego-moving perspective) while the latter is typically used to describe events moving towards the ego (time-moving perspective). We provide empirical evidence that different frames of reference are elicited depending on the specific metaphorical expression in Spanish (Corpus Analysis, Experiments 1 and 2), to the extent that the use of these linguistic forms in temporal sentences affects subsequent spatial reasoning (Experiment 3). We conclude that Spanish has some metaphorical expressions that are not neutral regarding the ego-/time-moving perspectives, and that their use affects how people draw on spatial motion schemas when thinking about time and space.