Spatial Cognition and the Semantics of Prepositions in English, Polish and Russian

The object of this work will be a selected group of prepositions in English, Polish and Russian which can express spatial relationships? This study focuses on "everyday" usage of the languages in question

Insights on the nature of language from the study of gesture units

Gesture categories and gesture units are characterized according to both formal and functional criteria. The resultant functional types fall along a continuum according to the degree to which their tokens have conventionalized symbolic status. The more conventional the form/meaning pairing, the more straightforward it is to identify gestures as units. Most types of gesture categories are best viewed as having prototype structures, rather than a category structure with strict boundaries. This view on gesture aligns with some contemporary thinking about linguistic categories, which also espouses a prototype approach. The result is a coherent picture of how gesture interactions with different categories and units of spoken language, taking human audio-visual communication as dynamic and polysemiotic in nature

The Alestle - Vol. 50 No. 20 - 09/30/1997

Vol. 50 No. 2

Spatial deixis in speech and gesture in Brazilian Portuguese: an experimental pilot-study

Partindo da afirmação corporificada de que nossas conceptualizações estão ancoradas no mundo físico, os gestos também deveriam se referir a essas conceptualizações BARSALOU, 1999; CIENKI, 1998A, 1998B, 2008, 2013; GLENBERG & ROBERTSON, 2000; HOSTETTER & ALIBALI, 2008). Neste estudo, investigamos como nossas conceptualizações do físico e do abstrato são expressas na fala e nos gestos, utilizando a distinção quaternária, encontrada no Português Brasileiro, entre “aqui” (próximo ao falante), “aí” (próximo ao interlocutor), “ali” (próximo tanto do falante quanto do interlocutor) e “lá” (distante de ambos). Testamos duas hipóteses opostas: 1) a de que os gestos utilizados na dêixis concreta e abstrata seriam similares, com base nas afirmações da teoria corporificada; e 2) a de que o uso dos gestos seria diferente, com base nas afirmações feitas pelas neurociências e ancoradas em padrões de uso dos dêiticos supracitados, coletados de um corpus de fala do Português Brasileiro. Vinte e quatro participantes foram solicitados a encenar pequenos scripts, contendo oito contextos, cada qual com uma ocorrência de uso concreta e uma abstrata dos dêiticos “aqui”, “aí”, “ali” e “lá”. Os resultados demonstraram que a oposição semântica entre “aqui” e “lá” também está presente nos gestos que co-ocorrem com a fala. Entretanto, não há uma diferença clara no uso dos gestos com o “aí”, quando comparado às outras palavras-chave, tal como poderia ser antecipado a partir do uso desse dêitico no corpus C-ORAL Brasil. Gestos que co-ocorrem com o uso concreto das palavras-chave são similares, em alguns aspectos, àqueles que co-ocorrem com o uso abstrato, mas há também muitas diferenças. Em conclusão, a imagem parece ser ativada em usos referenciais abstratos, na utilização dos pronomes adverbiais espaciais, mas os fatores que motivam as particularidades das diferenças encontradas necessitam ser exploradas em trabalhos futuros.Departing from the embodiment assumption that our conceptualizations are grounded in the physical world, gestures should also refer to those conceptualizations (BARSALOU, 1999; CIENKI, 1998A, 1998B, 2008, 2013; GLENBERG & ROBERTSON, 2000; HOSTETTER & ALIBALI, 2008). In this study, we investigate how our conceptualizations of the physical and of the abstract are expressed in speech and gesture, using the four-way spatial distinction found in Brazilian Portuguese between ‘aqui’ (near to speaker), ‘aí’ (near to addressee), ‘ali’ (near to both speaker and addressee), and ‘lá’ (distant to both). We tested two opposing hypotheses: 1) that gestures used with concrete and abstract deixis may be similar to each other, based on claims from embodiment theory, and 2) that gesture use may differ in concrete and abstract deixis, based on claims from neuroscience and based on patterns of usage of these deictic words found in a corpus of spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Twenty-four participants were asked to act out small scripts with eight contexts, each containing one occurrence of both concrete and abstract uses of ‘aqui’, ‘aí’, ‘ali’, and ‘lá’. The results show the semantic opposition between 'aqui' and 'lá' is also present in co-verbal gesture. But there was not a clear difference in gesture use with ‘aí’ as compared with the other key words, as one might have anticipated from the use of the word in the C-ORAL Brasil corpus. Gestures with concrete use of the key words are similar in some ways to gestures with abstract use, but there are also many differences. In conclusion, imagery seems to be activated with abstract reference using these spatial adverbial pronouns, but the factors motivating the particularities of the differences remain to be explored in future work

Metaphor in organizational research: Context, modalities and implications for research introduction

We provide a general overview of previous work which has explored the use of metaphors in organizational research. Differences in focus and form of research on metaphors are noted. Work in organization theory (OT) and organizational communication (OC) generally features prescriptive metaphors that aid the practice of theorizing and research; research in organizational development (OD) tends to use metaphors for intervention in individual and group decision-making; while studies of organizational behaviour (OB) emphasize the metaphors-in-use within individuals' sensemaking accounts of critical events within their organization. Alongside these differences in focus, the form of metaphor analysis also differs across these contexts, ranging from text- and discourse-based analysis to the analysis of non-linguistic modalities such as pictorial signs, gestures and artefacts. Based on our overview of previous work, we call for greater attention to methodological issues around metaphor identification and analysis and outline a number of directions for further research

The study of gesture in cognitive linguistics: How it could inform and inspire other research in cognitive science

Cognitive linguists are increasingly extending their paradigm to include the study of gestures. The bottom-up, usage-based approach in cognitive linguistics has advanced the methods for identifying gesture functions, starting from a detailed analysis of gesture forms. Theoretical notions from cognitive linguistics also help explain the means by which the forms of gestures can be interpreted as meaningful functions. Principles of conceptual metonymy explain how gestures indicate referents through the partial representation of their features that are relevant in the context of use. Conceptual metaphor theory sheds light on how abstract notions can be represented in gesture via comparison with physical source domains. Furthermore, every gestural representation inherently requires the gesturing speaker to employ a specific viewpoint for their depiction—something which is normally not expressed verbally. These aspects of gesture provide insights into processes of thinking for speaking that can be exploited in various fields of cognitive science research. Referential gestures also normally combine pragmatic and interactive functions (showing stance-taking, for example) with representational or deictic functions. The multiple functions of gesture combined with those of speech raise questions for further research about how viewing-listeners interpret and combine information from the multiple semiotic systems employed by gesturing-speakers. Finally, gesture use has been shown to correlate not only with lexical concepts but also in some ways with grammatical constructions. This gives rise to fundamental questions about what constitutes the grammar of a language. Gesture analysis thus raises issues for consideration in any research in cognitive science that concerns spoken language. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Psychology > Language