Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason about time, and if so, when and how? Three experiments investigated how (...) thinking about “abstract” motion through sequences of numbers or letters would influence reasoning about time. Our results extend earlier psychological work on the link between time and space by showing that even motion in non-physical domains can influence temporal reasoning. The results provide further evidence that metaphorical understanding is grounded in our everyday physical and conceptual experience. (shrink)

Temporal perspectives allow us to place ourselves and temporal events on a timeline, making it easier to conceptualize time. This study investigates how we take different temporal perspectives in our temporal gestures. We asked participants (n = 36) to retell temporal scenarios written in the Moving‐Ego, Moving‐Time, and Time‐Reference‐Point perspectives in spontaneous and encouraged gesture conditions. Participants took temporal perspectives mostly in similar ways regardless of the gesture condition. Perspective comparisons showed that temporal gestures of our participants resonated better with (...) the Ego‐ (i.e., Moving‐Ego and Moving‐Time) versus Time‐Reference‐Point distinction instead of the classical Moving‐Ego versus Moving‐Time contrast. Specifically, participants mostly produced more Moving‐Ego and Time‐Reference‐Point gestures for the corresponding scenarios and speech; however, the Moving‐Time perspective was not adopted more than the others in any condition. Similarly, the Moving‐Time gestures did not favor an axis over the others, whereas Moving‐Ego gestures were mostly sagittal and Time‐Reference‐Point gestures were mostly lateral. These findings suggest that we incorporate temporal perspectives into our temporal gestures to a considerable extent; however, the classical Moving‐Ego and Moving‐Time classification may not hold for temporal gestures. (shrink)

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek‐speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these (...) events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer distance, or a longer time?). Results showed a reliable cross‐dimensional asymmetry. For the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of linguistic framing used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space‐time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation. (shrink)

What is the nature of number systems and arithmetic that we use in science for quantification, analysis, and modeling? I argue that number concepts and arithmetic are neither hardwired in the brain, nor do they exist out there in the universe. Innate subitizing and early cognitive preconditions for number— which we share with many other species—cannot provide the foundations for the precision, richness, and range of number concepts and simple arithmetic, let alone that of more complex mathematical concepts. Numbers and (...) arithmetic, and mathematics in general, have unique features—precision, objectivity, rigor, generalizability, stability, symbolizability, and applicability to the real world—that must be accounted for. They are sophisticated concepts that developed culturally only in recent human history. I suggest that numbers and arithmetic are realized through precise combinations of non-mathematical everyday cognitive mechanisms that make human imagination and abstraction possible. One such mechanism, conceptual metaphor, is a neurally instantiated inference-preserving cross-domain mapping that allows the conceptualization of abstract entities in terms of grounded bodily experience. I analyze how the inferential organization of the properties and “laws” of arithmetic emerge metaphorically from everyday meaningful actions. Numbers and arithmetic are thus—outside of natural selection—the product of the biologically constrained interaction of individuals with the appropriate cultural and historical phenotypic variation supported by language, writing systems, and education. (shrink)

Starting from the overwhelming view that time is metaphorically conceptualized in terms of space, this study will, on the one hand, take the time interval words into minute analysis to confirm our view of event conceptualization of time at a more basic level along with space–time metaphoric conceptualization of time at a relational level. In alignment with the epistemology of the time–space conflation of the Chinese ancestors, our view is supported by the systematic examination of evidence related to the cultural (...) origins of the conceptualization of time, through a scrutiny of the original meanings and construction of words related to intervals of time in Mandarin Chinese. This study offers a new explanation of how: the conceptualization of time in Chinese is realized through metonymic cognition and words related to specific intervals of time are coined based on the metonymic conceptualization of related events or a corresponding event schema. Five major types of event-based metonymies are identified, and their interactive functions are illustrated. Based on this evidence, we argue that the double nature of both metaphoric and metonymic time conceptualization in Mandarin Chinese lies in the fact that time interval words can be used in its time categorial sense or as a time entity which suggests the etymological origins of Chinese as ideograph. It is concluded therefore that the event-based metonymy conceptualization of time can provide better insights into the characteristics of Chinese modes of thinking and its influences on the perception of and interaction with the world. This study can also serve as good evidence for the shaping effect of language on cognition. (shrink)

This study examines the visual representation of diegetic time in visual narrative stories, and explores why the invisible diegetic time flow could be expressed through visible elements, and how patterns and textures could be used to specify states of happenings. The study demonstrates that metaphorical relations between time and space are visually realized in visual narratives, leading to the representation of diegetic time and its related concepts on different levels of two-dimensional space. The segmentation of page space and the visual (...) components within panel space are employed to build a diegetic timeline as well as specify temporal aspects of actions and states in visual narrative stories. Neuroscientific evidence which suggests that a common metric is used to compute magnitudes of time and space in the human brain might help explain why time as an abstract concept could undergo visual materialization in visual narratives. (shrink)

Mandarin speakers, like most other language speakers around the world, use spatial terms to talk about time. However, the direction of their mental temporal representation along the front-back axis remains controversial because they use the spatial term “front” to refer to both earlier times and the future. Although the linguistic distinction between time- and ego-reference-point spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin suggests a promising clarification of the above controversy, there is little empirical evidence verifying this distinction. In this study, Mandarin speakers’ time- (...) and ego-reference-point temporal representations on three axes were separately examined through two tasks. In a time-reference-point task, Mandarin speakers judged whether the time point of the second picture was earlier or later than the time point of the first picture, while in an ego-reference-point task, they judged whether an event or phase had happened in the past or would happen in the future. The results indicate that Mandarin speakers construe an earlier-times-in-front-of-later-times temporal sequence and adopt the front-to-the-future orientation. (shrink)

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has been little used by archaeologists. A key barrier is that current metaphor analysis relies on linguistic evidence, a resource that archaeologists rarely have. Methods for interpreting entirely “material metaphors” have yet to develop. This article explores CMT in a domain of long-standing archaeological interest: settlement structure. Anthropologists have long recognized that hunter-gatherers place their dwellings close to those they are close to socially, usually their kin. Archaeologists have assumed the same holds true for prehistory—although without (...) direct evidence. This article explains why people consistently associate with their kin this way, and how the metaphor, “SOCIAL DISTANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTANCE,” structures hunter-gatherer campsites worldwide. Archaeologists can infer the existence of this metaphor in the archaeological record without linguistic support. Furthermore, they can assume it exists in all human societies for as long as human brains have been wired up as they currently are. (shrink)

Several reaction time (RT) studies report faster responses when responses to temporal information are arranged in a spatially congruent manner than when this arrangement is incongruent. The resulting space–time congruency effect is commonly attributed to a culturally salient localization of temporal information along a mental timeline (e.g., a mental timeline that runs from left to right). The present study aims to provide a compilation of the published RT studies on this time–space association in order to estimate the size of its (...) effect and the extent of potential publication bias in this field of research. In this meta-analysis, three types of task are distinguished due to hitherto existing empirical findings. These findings suggest that the extent to which time is made relevant to the experimental task has a systematic impact on whether or not the mental timeline is activated. The results of this meta-analysis corroborate these considerations: First, experiments that make time a task-relevant dimension have a mean effect size of d = 0.46. Second, in experiments in which time is task irrelevant, the effect size does not significantly deviate from zero. Third, temporal priming studies have a surprisingly high mean effect size of d = 0.47, which, however, should be adjusted to d = 0.36 due to publication bias. (shrink)

This paper proposes a cognitive linguistic explanation of the unusual narrative construal of time as moving backwards. It shows that backwards time in narrative involves setting up an alternative space in which a second narrative is constructed simultaneously, resulting in a viewpoint hierarchy which postulates four viewpoints on each discourse statement. The paper draws together research on conceptual metaphor, mental spaces theory and viewpoint multiplicity, bringing it to bear on discourse fragments. The majority of these are taken from Martin Amis’s (...) Time’s Arrow (Amis, Martin. 2003 [1991]. Time’s Arrow. London: Vintage.) (a logically consistent and linguistically revealing text), but the discussion is contextualised with further examples. It is argued that the causal construal implied by narrative is not limited by our phenomenological experience, as other studies (e.g., Evans, Vyvyan. 2013. Language and time: A cognitive linguistics approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) might suggest, but is instead prompted by conceptual re-interpretation of deictic markers in the discourse. The analysis focuses on causal construal, negation (especially causal catachresis), and alternativity. It shows how linguistic features at the sentential level generate top-down reorganization of both episodic structure and discourse meaning, and how this relies on multiplicity of viewpoint and a conceptual “zooming out” prompting the perception of irony. (shrink)

This study investigates how typological and metaphorical construal differences may affect the use and frequency of temporal expressions in English and Spanish. More precisely, we explore whether there are any differences between English, a satellite-framed language, and Spanish, a verb-framed language, in the use of certain temporal linguistic expressions that include a spatial, deictic component (Deictic Time), a purely temporal relation between two events (Sequential Time) or the expression of the duration of an event (Duration). To achieve this, we perform (...) two different types of analysis. First, we conduct an informational gain or loss analysis (Verkerk, 2013) of 1,650 of English-to-Spanish translations extracted from parallel corpora. Secondly, we compare the frequency of 33 English and 27 Spanish temporal expressions in two similar written online corpora (EnTenTen and EsTenTen, respectively) and a television news spoken corpus (NewsScape). Our results suggest that English uses “deictic directional expressions” (explicitly stating the spatial location of the temporal event,, e.g., back in those days/in the future ahead) much more frequently than Spanish, to the extent that directional information is normally excluded in English-to-Spanish translations. Also, sequential expressions (such as before that/later than) and duration expressions (during the whole day) are much more frequent in Spanish. These usage differences, explained by the variability in motion typology and metaphoric construal, open up the interesting question of how these differences in linguistic usage could affect the conceptualization of time of English and Spanish speakers. (shrink)

This study investigates whether there is a relation between the semantics of linguistic expressions that indicate temporal distance and the spatial properties of their co-speech gestures. To this date, research on time gestures has focused on features such as gesture axis, direction, and shape. Here we focus on a gesture property that has been overlooked so far: the distance of the gesture in relation to the body. To achieve this, we investigate two types of temporal linguistic expressions are addressed: proximal (...) (e.g., near future, near past) and distal (e.g., distant past, distant future). Data was obtained through the NewsScape library, a multimodal corpus of television news. A total of 121 co-speech gestures were collected and divided into the two categories. The gestures were later annotated in terms of gesture space and classified in three categories: (i) center, (ii) periphery, and (iii) extreme periphery. Our results suggest that gesture and language are coherent in the expression of temporal distance: when speakers locate an event far from them, they tend to gesture further from their body; similarly, when locating an event close to them, they gesture closer to their body. These results thus reveal how co-speech gestures also reflect a space-time mapping in the dimension of distance. (shrink)

Two experiments investigated whether motion metaphors for time affected the perception of spatial motion. Participants read sentences either about literal motion through space or metaphorical motion through time written from either the ego‐moving or object‐moving perspective. Each sentence was followed by a cartoon clip. Smiley‐moving clips showed an iconic happy face moving toward a polygon, and shape‐moving clips showed a polygon moving toward a happy face. In Experiment 1, using an explicit judgment task, participants judged smiley‐moving cartoons as related to (...) ego‐moving sentences about space and about time, and shape‐moving cartoons as related to object‐moving sentences. In Experiment 2, participants viewed the same stimuli, but the cartoons were task‐irrelevant. Event‐related brain potentials revealed an early attentional effect of congruity on cartoons following sentences about space, and a later semantic effect on cartoons following sentences about time. Results are most consistent with accounts that posit differences in the processing of novel and conventional metaphors. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 2 Seiten: 205-233.

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking (...) place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Speakers perform manual gestures in the physical space nearest them, called gesture space. We used a controlled elicitation task to explore whether speakers use gesture space in a consistent way and whether they use space in a contrastive way when talking about abstract referents. Participants answered two questions designed to elicit contrastive, abstract discourse. We investigated manual gesture behavior. Gesture hand, location on the horizontal axis, and referent in corresponding speech were coded. We also coded contrast in speech. Participants’ overall (...) tendency to use the same hand = 13.12, p =.001, 95% CI [.31,.43], d = 2.53) and same location = 7.47, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.47], d = 1.69) when referring to an entity was higher than expected frequency. When comparing pairs of gestures produced with contrastive speech to pairs of gestures produced with non-contrastive speech, we found a greater tendency to produce gestures with different hands for contrastive speech: = 4.19, p =.001, 95% CI [.27,.82], d = 1.42). We did not find associations between dominant side and positive concepts or between left, center, and right space and past, present, and future, respectively, as predicted by previous studies. Taken together, our findings suggest that speakers do produce spatially consistent and contrastive gestures for abstract as well as concrete referents. They may be using spatial resources to assist with abstract thinking, and/or to help interlocutors with reference tracking. Our findings also highlight the complexity of predicting gesture hand and location, which appears to be the outcome of many competing variables. (shrink)

Across cultures people construct spatial representations of time. However, the particular spatial layouts created to represent time may differ across cultures. This paper examines whether people automatically access and use culturally specific spatial representations when reasoning about time. In Experiment 1, we asked Hebrew and English speakers to arrange pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events, and to point to the hypothesized location of events relative to a reference point. In both tasks, English speakers (who read left to right) arranged (...) temporal sequences to progress from left to right, whereas Hebrew speakers (who read right to left) arranged them from right to left, replicating previous work. In Experiments 2 and 3, we asked the participants to make rapid temporal order judgments about pairs of pictures presented one after the other (i.e., to decide whether the second picture showed a conceptually earlier or later time-point of an event than the first picture). Participants made responses using two adjacent keyboard keys. English speakers were faster to make “earlier” judgments when the “earlier” response needed to be made with the left response key than with the right response key. Hebrew speakers showed exactly the reverse pattern. Asking participants to use a space-time mapping inconsistent with the one suggested by writing direction in their language created interference, suggesting that participants were automatically creating writing-direction consistent spatial representations in the course of their normal temporal reasoning. It appears that people automatically access culturally specific spatial representations when making temporal judgments even in nonlinguistic tasks. (shrink)

The neural realization of number in abstract form is implausible, but from this it doesn't follow that numbers are not abstract. Clear definitions of abstraction are needed so they can be applied homogenously to numerical and non-numerical cognition. To achieve a better understanding of the neural substrate of abstraction, productive cognition must be investigated.

Appeals to the ‘common sense’, or ‘naïve’, or ‘folk’ concept of time, and the purported phenomenology as of time passing, play a substantial role in philosophical theorising about time. When making these appeals, philosophers have been content to draw upon their own assumptions about how non-philosophers think about time. This paper reviews a series of recent experiments bringing these assumptions into question. The results suggest that the way non-philosophers think about time is far less metaphysically demanding than philosophers have assumed.

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 1 Seiten: 35-65.

Early quantitative skills cannot be directly extended to provide the richness, precision, and sophistication of the concept of natural number. These skills must interact with top-down mathematical schemas, which can be explained by bodily grounded everyday mechanisms for abstraction and imagination (e.g., conceptual metaphor, blending) that are both biologically plausible and culturally shaped (established beyond the child's mind).

Mathematics is a unique body of knowledge. Among others, it is abstract, exact, efficient, symbolizable, and it provides astonishing applications to the real world. In the domain of philosophy of mathematics the study of the practice of mathematics has gradually become an important area of investigation. What aspects of the human body and mind make the peculiar practice of mathematics possible? In this article, I briefly review some cogntive dimensions that play a crucial role in the creation and consolidation of (...) mathematics. (shrink)

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: nayra (“front”) and qhipa (“back”), denoting east and west, respectively. Why? We use different but complementary ethnographic methods to investigate the nature of this encoding: (a) linguistic expressions and speech–gesture co-production, (b) linguistic patterns in the distinct regional Spanish-based variety Castellano Andino (...) (CA), (c) metaphorical extensions of CA’s spatial patterns to temporal ones, and (d) layouts of traditional houses. Findings indicate that, following fundamental principles of Aymara cosmology, people, objects, and land—as a whole—are conceived as having an implicit canonical orientation facing east, a primary landmark determined by the sunrise. The above bodily based lexicalizations are thus linguistic manifestations of a broader macro-cultural worldview and its psycho-cognitive reality. (shrink)

A recent issue of Topics in Cognitive Science featured 11 thoughtful commentaries responding to our article “What happened to cognitive science?” (Núñez et al., 2019). Here, we identify several themes that arose in those commentaries and respond to each. Crucial to understanding our original article is the fundamental distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors: Cognitive science began (and has stayed) as multidisciplinary but has failed to move on to form a cohesive interdisciplinary field. We clarify and elaborate our original argument (...) and reiterate the importance of a data‐driven evaluation of the current status of the field, which exhibits a marked disciplinary imbalance, a lack of a coherent conceptual core, and a striking absence of a consistent curriculum in the institutions that grant degrees in this domain. Half a century after the creation of cognitive science, it may now be a good time to revisit goals and visions for how to best approach the ever‐fascinating scientific study of the mind(s). (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

The canonical history of mathematics suggests that the late 19th-century “arithmetization” of calculus marked a shift away from spatial-dynamic intuitions, grounding concepts in static, rigorous definitions. Instead, we argue that mathematicians, both historically and currently, rely on dynamic conceptualizations of mathematical concepts like continuity, limits, and functions. In this article, we present two studies of the role of dynamic conceptual systems in expert proof. The first is an analysis of co-speech gesture produced by mathematics graduate students while proving a theorem, (...) which reveals a reliance on dynamic conceptual resources. The second is a cognitive-historical case study of an incident in 19th-century mathematics that suggests a functional role for such dynamism in the reasoning of the renowned mathematician Augustin Cauchy. Taken together, these two studies indicate that essential concepts in calculus that have been defined entirely in abstract, static terms are nevertheless conceptualized dynamically, in both contemporary and historical practice. (shrink)

We reviewed literature to understand when a spatial map for time is available in the brain. We carefully defined the concepts of metrical map of time and of conceptual representation of time as the mental time line (MTL) in order to formulate our position. It is that both metrical map and conceptual representation of time are spatial in nature. The former should be innate, related to motor/implicit timing, it should represent all magnitudes with an analogic and bi-dimensional structure. The latter (...) MTL should be learned, available at about 8–10 years-old and related to cognitive/explicit time. It should have uni-dimensional, linear and directional structure (left-to-right in Western culture). We bear the centrality of the development of number cognition, of time semantic concepts and of reading/writing habits for the development of ordinality and linearity of the MTL. (shrink)

One of the core tenets of cognitive metaphor theory is the claim that metaphors ground abstract knowledge in concrete, first-hand experience. In this paper, I argue that this grounding hypothesis contains some problematic conceptual ambiguities and, under many reasonable interpretations, empirical difficulties. I present evidence that there are foundational obstacles to defining a coherent and cognitively valid concept of “metaphor” and “concrete meaning,” and some general problems with singling out certain domains of experience as more immediate than others. I conclude (...) from these considerations that whatever the facts are about the comprehension of individual metaphors, the available evidence is incompatible with the notion of an underlying conceptual structure organized according to the immediacy of experience. (shrink)

According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, people’s sagittal mental space-time mappings are conditioned by their temporal-focus attention. Based on this, it can be predicted that, by virtue of their future-oriented thinking, individuals with high anxiety should be more likely to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping than those with low anxiety. Utilizing a combined correlational and experimental approach, we found converging evidence for this prediction. Studies 1 and 2 found that individuals higher in dispositional anxiety and state anxiety, (...) who characteristically worry about the future, were more likely to conceptualize the future as in front of them and the past as behind than individuals lower in dispositional anxiety and state anxiety. Study 3 showed that participants who were induced with anxiety mood tended to map the future on a frontal position, compared to those in the baseline condition. These findings shed further light on the Temporal Focus Hypothesis, thus providing the first experimental evidence that emotional experience can influence people’s temporal-focus attention in determining their metaphorical sagittal orientation of time. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Previous research suggests that both patterns in orthography and cultural-specific associations of space-time affect how people map space onto time. In the current study, we focused on Chinese Buddhists, an understudied population, investigating how religious experiences influence their mental representations of time. Results showed that Chinese Buddhists could represent time spatially corresponding to left-to-right, right-to-left and top-to-bottom orientations in their religious scripts. Specifically, they associated earlier events with the starting point of the reading and later times with the endpoint. We (...) also found that Chinese Buddhists were more likely to represent time in a clockwise way than Chinese atheists. This is because Buddhism regards time as cyclic and consisting of repeating ages (i.e. Wheel of Time). Taken together, we provide first psychological evidence that Chinese Buddhists’ spatial representations of time are different from atheists’, due to their religious experiences, namely, both the reading direction in Buddhist texts and Buddhist concepts of time. (shrink)

People implicitly associate the “past” and “future” with “front” and “back” in their minds according to their cultural attitudes toward time. As the temporal focus hypothesis proposes, future-oriented people tend to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping, whereas past-oriented people tend to think about time according to the past-in-front mapping. Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that culture exerts an important influence on people's implicit spatializations of time, we focus specifically on religion, a prominent layer of culture, as potential (...) additional influence on space-time mappings. In Experiment 1 and 2, we observed a difference between the two religious groups, with Buddhists being more past-focused and more frequently conceptualizing the past as ahead of them and the future as behind them, and Taoists more future-focused and exhibiting the opposite space-time mapping. In Experiment 3, we administered a religion prime, in which Buddhists were randomly assigned to visualize the picture of the Buddhas of the Past or the Future. Results showed that the pictorial icon of Dipamkara increased participants' tendency to conceptualize the past as in front of them. In contrast, the pictorial icon of Maitreya caused a dramatic increase in the rate of future-in-front responses. In Experiment 4, the causal effect of religion on implicit space-time mappings was replicated in atheists. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence for the hypothesized causal role of religion for temporal focus in determining space-time mappings. (shrink)

In previous analyses of the influence of language on cognition, speech has been the main channel examined. In studies conducted among Yucatec Mayas, efforts to determine the preferred frame of reference in use in this community have failed to reach an agreement (Bohnemeyer & Stolz, 2006; Levinson, 2003 vs. Le Guen, 2006, 2009). This paper argues for a multimodal analysis of language that encompasses gesture as well as speech, and shows that the preferred frame of reference in Yucatec Maya is (...) only detectable through the analysis of co-speech gesture and not through speech alone. A series of experiments compares knowledge of the semantics of spatial terms, performance on nonlinguistic tasks and gestures produced by men and women. The results show a striking gender difference in the knowledge of the semantics of spatial terms, but an equal preference for a geocentric frame of reference in nonverbal tasks. In a localization task, participants used a variety of strategies in their speech, but they all exhibited a systematic preference for a geocentric frame of reference in their gestures. (shrink)

This study concerns the distribution of metaphorical lexis in discrete syntactic constructions. Source and target seed language from established conceptual metaphors in economic discourse is used to catalogue the specific patterns of how metaphorical pairs align in five syntactic constructions: A-NP, N-N, NP-of-NP, V-NP, and X is Y. Utilizing the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the examination includes 12 frequent metaphorical target triggers combined with 84 source triggers to produce 2,016 ordered collocations, i.e. investment freeze and turbulent market. Through detailed (...) type and token counts, results confirm that source domains function as conceptual material used to structure the target domain and disproportionally fill syntactic positions associated with predication, Studies in cognitive corpus linguistics. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishers; Sullivan, Karen. 2013. Frames and constructions in metaphoric language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing). Given a lexeme’s origin – source or target – when used in source-target metaphors, syntactic alignment can be predicted, market climate is metaphorical, climate market is not. Exceptions to these strong tendencies are explained through genre-specific lexicalization processes in which predicate denoting terms like bubble establish themselves as domain modifiers in economic jargon. Through quantitative techniques to gage metaphorical conventionality and lexical versatility, corpus methodology is used to define and inform the value of frequency effects in cataloguing and understanding metaphorical lexicalization. (shrink)