Publications

Publication details [#7078]

Lakoff, George. 2008. The neuroscience of metaphoric gestures: Why they exist (Comment on Cienki and Müller, eds. 2008) In Cienki, Alan and Cornelia Müller. Metaphor and Gesture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 283–285. 3 pp.
Publication type
Article in book  
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Abstract

Researchers have found examples by the hundreds - across languages - and I have noticed examples by the thousands in everyday life. One of the most interesting is Alan Cienki's (1998) example in which college students, who are talking, gesture with the past at the left and the future at the right. The metaphors Past is Left and Future is Right only work for gestures, not spoken language. The obvious theoretical conclusion is that metaphoric gestures provide evidence - independent of words - for the theory of conceptual metaphors. (George Lakoff)