“Next Wednesday’s Meeting has been Moved Forward Two Days”: The Time-Perspective Question is Ambiguous in Swiss German, but not in Standard German

Abstract

If time is conceived of as a river, we either have the perspective of seeing ourselves as moving downstream toward the future (e.g., “We are approaching the future,” called ego moving), or we have the perspective of the future as moving upstream toward us (e.g., “The future is approaching,” called time moving). Most ego- and time-moving studies have been conducted by using an English ego/time-moving ambiguous question to implicitly measure a person’s current time perspective (ego vs. time moving). In the current study, we replicate previous findings that in (Standard) German the time-perspective question is not ambiguous, while showing as a new finding that it is ambiguous in Swiss German. We attribute this difference to different normative uses in these two German variants. To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate dialectal differences in relation to cognitive processing of ego-/time-moving metaphors. Psychological and linguistic implications are discussed.