Silent, but salient: gestures in simultaneous interpreting

This study is aimed at studying the saliency in the gestures of simultaneous interpreters. To distinguish between distinguished gestures and non-selected ones, two groups of parameters are proposed - main and auxiliary, which are evaluated in relation to the general gesticulation style of the same interprete

THE ADESSIVE CASE IN POLISH: A COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE ON SOME LOCATIVE PREPOSITIONS

The aim of this paper is to show that what is considered in Polish as one heterogeneous LOCA- TIVE case in the “formal” approach only on the surface seems rather complex and appears to lack any natural order. Due to the limited size of the paper, focus will be laid only on one locative case, the ADESSIVE, representing the static external locative, expressing different aspects of a relationship outside an entity and describing the “location ‘on top of’ or ‘near’, ‘owner’ or ‘in- strument’ by means of which an action is performed” (Karlsson 1999: 115). It has no single lin- guistic equivalent in Polish; instead it is represented by several prepositions, such as na + LOC ‘on’, przy + LOC ‘by’ and u + GEN ‘at’, etc., reflecting different aspects of proximity and coin- cidence in space. Taking just the case of the ADESSIVE relation, data observations based on the IPI PAN Corpus of Polish allow us to claim that although each preposition is responsible for a different aspect of the external spatial relation, they complement one another and are related in a family resemblance fashion, expressing an adessive relation

Which Is in Front of Chinese People, Past or Future? The Effect of Language and Culture on Temporal Gestures and Spatial Conceptions of Time

The temporal‐focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space–time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space–time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co‐speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back (besides future‐in‐front/past‐at‐back) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back space–time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space–time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space–time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space–time mappings, but a cross‐cultural comparison of space–time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal‐focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space–time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space–time mappings and the relationship between language and thought

How co-speech gestures are rendered in audio description : a case study

The description of co-speech gestures is an under-researched area of audio description. This chapter draws attention to the concept of audio description strategies. As well as looking at the ways in which co-speech gestures are described in audio description, Jankowska and Zabrocka explore the methodological implications of including gesture types into analysis of gesture description. This chapter concludes with the results of a case study in the form of qualitative and quantitative analysis of a corpus of six professionally audio described films