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Publication details [#3506]

Abstract

Cienki and Müller argue in their chapter that gestures offer important insights into the metaphorical nature of language, thought, and cultural ideas ("Metaphor, Gesture, and Thought"). They describe a variety of linguistic, psychological, and anthropological evidence showing how detailed analyses of gesture offer support for the claim that metaphor is a general, pervasive cognitive principle, and that many metaphoric mappings, such as those evident in metaphoric gestures, are processed online during face-to-face talk. Cienki and Müller discuss some methodological issues related to studying metaphoric gestures in naturalistic settings, including the problem of correctly identifying and labeling underlying conceptual metaphors. Their chapter emphasizes that metaphor is best conceived of as a cognitive activity that occurs online in the process of speaking and is therefore clearly an example of dynamic embodied cognition. (Raymond Gibbs)