Space and Time in Chinese: Separated or Integrated?

Chinese encodes space and time in rather complex ways. While some scholars claim that Chinese is characterized by spatiality and English by temporality, other scholars disagree by presenting proofs that Chinese is better described as a language of time-space conflation. This paper, by focusing on Chinese single characters and larger-than-character clusters, tries to show that Chinese is encoded in terms of space and time at different levels in diversified ways. Space and time seem to be two sides of a coin, which are interrelated and also relatively separated; space and time are two distinct concepts and two ways of constituting language and the world. Depending on different perspectives and purposes of research, we perceive language in quite different ways.