The production line as a context for low metaphoricity
Exploring links between gestures, iconicity, and artefacts on a factory shop floor
This paper investigates metaphor use in a heavily industrialized context. Using
video recordings collected at a salmon factory in France as data, I study metaphor
in the gestures that workers perform in technical specialist communication
along a noisy production line. Within a framework for describing gesture
forms and identifying their underlying conceptual motivations, I analyse the
iconicity of the gestures and argue that this stretch of the production line was
a context for low metaphoricity. My analyses show that gesture iconicity was
motivated by metonymic mappings within concrete source domains but not
metaphoric mappings to abstract target domains. This finding emphasises that
metaphor activation can depend on aspects of context, including the communicative
environment and the artefacts it contains.
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2017.
Cooperative gestures for industry: Exploring the efficacy of robot hand configurations in expression of instructional gestures for human–robot interaction.
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