Divergent reference frames in Chinese and Japanese spatiotemporal metaphors: a cross-cultural study of multidimensional mapping in Qian/Hou and Mae/Ato

Corpus-based, this study compares differences in the reference frames for spatiotemporal metaphors in Chinese 前/后 (qian/hou) and Japanese 前/後 (mae/ato, and the Sino-Japanese zen/go). A bilingual corpus centered on the CCL and the BCCWJ was constructed, and randomly sampled entries were manually annotated to distinguish the Ego-Perspective (EGO-P), which takes the ego as reference, from Sequence-as-Position (SAP), which takes event positions as reference. The data show that Chinese qian/hou display high semantic plasticity They can realize EGO-P mappings of “future-in-front/past-behind” while also functioning as SAP markers of sequence position. By contrast, Japanese mae/ato (and zen/go) tend toward semantic specialization, operating primarily within the SAP framework, with weaker lexicalization into EGO-P, and distributional statistics support this conclusion. This contrast reveals an internal tension, Chinese, via verbalization or nominalization, can present an embodied ego while also encoding sequencing through positional words or fixed collocations. Japanese more often semanticizes the mapping into serialized temporal markers, showing stronger constraints of grammaticalization. This difference is related not only to lexicalization pathways and register choice but may also be shaped by the combined influences of religious culture, social environment, and the historical patterns of language contact.