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Article published In:
Gesture
Vol. 16:3 (2017) ► pp.396–415

Time on hands

Deliberate and spontaneous temporal gestures by speakers of Mandarin

| Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, and Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

The present study investigates deliberate and spontaneous temporal gestures in Mandarin speakers. The results of our analysis show that when asked to gesture about past and future events deliberately (Study 1), Mandarin speakers tend to mimic space-time mappings in their spoken metaphors or graphic conventions for time in Chinese culture, including sagittal mappings (front/past, back/future), vertical mappings (up/past, down/future), and lateral mappings (left/past, right/future). However, in their spontaneous co-speech gestures about time (Study 2), more congruent gestures were produced on the lateral axis than on the vertical axis. This suggests that although Mandarin speakers could think about time vertically, they still showed a horizontal bias in their conceptions of time. Speakers were also more likely to gesture according to future-in-front mappings despite more past-in-front mappings found in spoken Chinese, suggesting a dissociation of temporal language and temporal thought. These results demonstrate that gesture is useful for revealing the spatial conceptualization of time.

Keywords: space, time, metaphor, Mandarin, gesture
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Study 1. Deliberate temporal gestures
    • Methods
      • Participants
      • Materials and procedure
      • Coding and reliability
    • Results and discussion
  • Study 2. Spontaneous temporal gestures
    • Methods
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure
      • Coding
    • Results and discussion
  • General discussion
    • Why temporal language and deliberate temporal gesture go hand in hand
    • Spontaneous gestures by Mandarin speakers
      • Lateral gestures
      • Vertical gestures
      • Sagittal gesture
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.00002.li
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