Edited by Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela and Daniel Alcaraz Carrión
In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in… read more
This paper examines whether observers use gestural information to decide the meaning of the polysemous verb touch in ambiguous contexts. To address this question, three studies were carried out. Study 1 tests whether observers could accurately distinguish the meaning of the verb touch just by… read more
In this chapter I discuss several creative instances of time co-speech gestures in English obtained from a repository of television news. I argue that, even though time gestures tend to follow certain patterns in their form, speakers may deviate, giving rise to more creative instances with a… read more
Psycholinguistic evidence shows that spatial domains are automatically activated when processing temporal expressions. Speakers conceptualize time as a straight line deployed along different axes (mostly sagittal, though also vertical). The use of the lateral axis, which cannot be lexicalized in… read more
