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Part of
Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity
Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
[Human Cognitive Processing 75] 2022
► pp. 209–232

Chapter 10
Time in Chinese hands

Gesture and sign

| University College London | University of Essex

This chapter examines how Chinese people (Mandarin monolinguals; Mandarin-English bilinguals; deaf Chinese Sign Language (CSL) signers; Mandarin learners of CSL) use gestures and signs to creatively represent time. All groups spatialize time on the lateral, vertical, and sagittal axes, but differ in their choices of axes and directions of movements. For instance, Mandarin-English bilinguals produce more vertical time gestures in Mandarin than in English. Mandarin speakers can produce past-in-front and past-at-back gestures, whereas CSL deaf signers only exploit past-at-back signs. Mandarin learners of CSL perform more past-at-back gestures than Mandarin-speaking non-signers. In short, cultural, linguistic, and bodily experiences can jointly shape how Chinese people express time creatively in different modalities.

Keywords: bimodal bilinguals, Chinese Sign Language, Mandarin, time spatialization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Mandarin space-time metaphors
  • 3.Time in Chinese gestures
    • 3.1Temporal gestures in Mandarin monolinguals
    • 3.2Do Mandarin-English bilingual speakers gesture about time differently in Mandarin and English?
  • 4.Time in Chinese Sign Language
    • 4.1Temporal expressions in CSL
    • 4.2Does bodily experience of CSL influence Mandarin speakers’ co-speech temporal gestures?
  • 5.What shapes the creation of time in Chinese hands?
    • 5.1The creativity of vertical space-time mappings
    • 5.2The creativity of asymmetric space-time mappings in CSL
  • 6.Summary and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.75.10gu
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