我们所说的语言是否会对我们的思维方式产生影响？很多学者一直试图探究解决这个问题。当中最著名的理论当属人类学家萨皮尔和沃尔夫所提出的理论—萨皮尔-沃尔夫假设，或者语言决定论假设，即我们用我们的语言来思考，而由于语言符号上的差异，不同的语言则相对应于不同的认知。从该理论提出到今天，许多实验和分析都试图来证明或反对这个假设。然而，迄今为止仍然没有让人满意的语言分析以解决这个问题。 根据鲁西 （1992a, 1992b, 1997）的提议，要解决这个问题，必须采用一个整合类型学和认知语言学分析的方法。 前者能够给出对语言详尽的分析，而这样的分析是解决语言是否决定思维的先决条件。 后者则能够分析出不同语言中隐喻的不同认知特征。 时间和空间在人类认知中是最基本的概念，本文将从跨语言对比的角度分析反映时间顺序的不同时空隐喻，以研究不同的语言是否导致不同的思维模式，甚至影响他们对世界的认知。具体来说，本文首先提供了对“时间即空间” 的隐喻的类型学分析：在中文和英语中各自都用垂直（上/下型）和水平（前/后型）两种隐喻来表达时间顺序 （虽然垂直的表达在中文中比较常见），同时在两个语言中两种类型的隐喻中都有固定的句型来表达时间顺序。在这个类型学分析的基础上， 本文采用莱考夫和约翰逊（1999）的时空隐喻分类来进行认知分析。 通过分析这些隐喻的固定语言结构的认知模式上的相同点和不同点，本文得出语言符号可能对说话者对时间的认知没有直接的影响。本文同时还应用了一个用来考查说话者的直觉的问卷调查，调查仍然显示相同的结果。在这些发现的基础上，本文得出，语言的随意性表达并不实质上影响说话者的认知过程。

Might the language we speak affect the way we think? Generations of thinkers have been intrigued by this idea. The most famous account about the question was made by the anthropologists Sapir and Whorf—known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. It holds that we think in our own language and different languages correspond to different cognitive patterns because of the differences in linguistic code. Since then, a great many experiments and analysis have been done to test the hypothesis. However, there has been no adequate linguistic analysis that can fully address the problem. To avoid the problem, following Lucy’s (1992a, 1992b, 1997) proposal, an integrated approach of typological and cognitive analysis is employed in the current study. The former provides a detailed description of the linguistic data and the latter reveals the cognitive patterns of metaphors in different language. Time and space are the most basic concepts in our cognition. This thesis is a cross-linguistic analysis on the effect that different conceptual metaphors of spatializing temporal relations in different languages (Chinese and English) might have on different language speakers’ cognition of time and thus investigates whether different linguistic behaviors will influence their interpretation of the reality. In detail, the current study presents a typological grouping of TIME AS SPACE metaphors: both vertical spatial terms (up/down type) and horizontal spatial terms (front/back type) in English and Chinese, though the vertical terms are more common in Chinese, and finds fixed structures of spatial terms in expressing temporal relations. On the basis of the typological grouping, a cognitive analysis adopted from Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) model of space-time metaphors is provided. By analyzing the similarities and differences of the cognitive patterns of the fixed linguistic structures metaphorically used in expressing temporal relations in Chinese and English, it is shown that linguistic data might not have direct correlation with speakers’ cognition of time. A questionnaire enquiring native speakers’ intuition also shows the same result, though with slight variance. Based on the findings, the author draws the conclusion that linguistic idiosyncrasies do not materially restrict the thought processes of their users.