CHAPTER 3 DATA AND METHODOLOGY
3.5 Temporal Patterning of Speech and Gesture
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they may not be directly related to image-schematic patterns. In the current data, all the
complex metaphors are based on physical activities we practice in ordinary life (e.g., picking
an object and weighing an object); therefore, ACTIVITY is identified as a kind of source. To
generalize, 9 kinds of sources are identified: ACTIVITY, BODY-PART, CONTAINER,
FICTIVE-MOTION, FORCE, OBJECT, PATH, PERSON, and SPACE. Except for BODY-PART and
PERSON, the other kinds of sources can be found in the current data.
A great variety of notions can be realized via metaphors. A target domain is typically
concrete; in some cases, a target can be abstract. Among the 247 metaphoric expressions
examined in the present study, 197 (79.8%) of them involve abstract targets (e.g., STATE and
TIME) and 50 (20.2%) of them include concrete targets (e.g., ACTIVITY and COLOR). In the
current data, 61 kinds of targets were found; however, not all of the target-domain concepts
appear frequently. Regarding the issue about the targets realized in habitual metaphoric
expressions, the present study respectively identified 8 kinds of targets that have at least five
tokens in the current data: GROUP, MENTAL ACTIVITY, (physical) ACTIVITY, DEGREE,
SEQUENCE, SPEECH CONTENT, STATE, and TIME. The remaining 53 kinds of targets will be
generalized as ‘others’.
3.5 Temporal Patterning of Speech and Gesture
In order to see the collaboration between language and gesture, the present study
examines how speech and gesture patterned temporally in expressing metaphor. According to
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McNeill (1992: 83), there are three phases of gesture: “preparation”, “stroke”, and
“retraction”. In the preparation phase, “the limb moves away from its rest position to a
position in gesture space where the stroke begins” (ibid.). In the stroke phase, “the meaning
of the gesture is expressed” (ibid.). The retraction phase is “the return of the hand to a rest
position” (ibid.). Both the preparation and the retraction are optional, but the stroke is
obligatory. The metaphoric expression in Example 6 involves the metaphoric gesture with the
three gesture phases.
|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*******-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-|
(6) F: ..大學之前的那個...兩個你都認識啊..不是啊..就現在那個之前的兩個你都認識啊
Figure 6. THE FORMERIS THE FRONT in gesture
The speaker states that the listener indeed knows her ex-boyfriends with whom she was
in a relationship before she entered college. The metaphor THE FORMER IS THE FRONT is
expressed in both language and gesture. The metaphoric idea is verbally expressed by spatial
(1) (2) (3)
(4)
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term
zīqiān ‘front’ and manually represented by the frontward movement. The manual
movement starts from the negative morpheme bù; during the preparation phase, the speaker’s
both hands move from her knee to the front of her chest (Panel 1 to 2 in Figure 4). The stroke
of the gesture refers to the lexical affiliate
zīqiān, as the speaker’s hands move forward (Panel
3). Finally, the retraction phase is the return of the speaker’s hands to her knee (Panel 4) when
she utters
liăng ‘two’.
Regarding the temporal relationship between gestures and accompanying speech, the
present study analyzes the stroke phases which are relevant to conveying information. The
gestural strokes can be further sorted into three types: those synchronizing with the associated
words (the synchronizing gestures), those coming before the associated words (the preceding
gestures), and those coming after the associated words (the following gestures).
3.6 Summary
In this chapter, the data and methodology adopted in the present study were introduced.
The linguistic and gestural data were obtained from twenty-six face-to-face conversations
from the NCCU Spoken Corpus of Mandarin. The present study pays attention to the
metaphors concurrently manifested in speech and gestural modalities and the metaphors
merely realized in gesture. To see people’s metaphoric expressions in ordinary conversations,
nine types of metaphor are identified to categorize the metaphoric expressions: body-part
metaphor, causation metaphor, conduit metaphor, container metaphor, entity metaphor,
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motion metaphor, orientation metaphor, personification metaphor, and complex metaphor.6
The present study also identifies the source-domain and target-domain concepts involving in
the metaphors and examines the correspondences between each source/target and the
metaphor types. Based on the notion of image schema, the source-domain concepts are
classified into nine kinds: ACTIVITY, BODY-PART, CONTAINER, FICTIVE-MOTION, FORCE,
OBJECT, PATH, PERSON, and SPACE. The target domains include a great variety of concepts.
The present study distinguishes eight target domains which have at least five tokens in the
current data while discussing the common target-domain concepts in Mandarin conversations.
The source-to-target correspondences are investigated as well; the correspondences from a
single source to multiple targets and the correspondences from many sources to a single
target are focused on. Regardless of their frequency, each kind of target is considered
independently to look at the one-source-to-many-targets correspondences and the
many-sources-to-one-target correspondences. Furthermore, the temporal patterning of speech
and gestures in conveying metaphors are examined to see the cognitive process underlying
speech and gesture production. The present study pays attention to the stroke phases which
are relevant in a gesture and recognizes the synchronizing gestures, the preceding gestures,
and the preceding gestures. Analyses concerning the methodology mentioned above will be
presented in Chapter 4.
6 The current data does not include have the body-part metaphor and the personification metaphor.
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55
CHAPTER 4
METAPHORS IN LANGUAGE AND GESTURE
This chapter includes the investigation of the cross-modal manifestations of metaphors
in daily communication. The 247 metaphoric expressions analyzed are divided into two main
groups. The language-gesture group includes 110 (44.5%) expressions with the same types of
metaphors across linguistic and gestural modalities. The gesture-only group contains 137
(55.5%) metaphoric expressions. To understand the habitual expressions of metaphors in
Mandarin conversations, the present study examines the cross-modal instantiations of
metaphor types, source domains, target domains, and source-to-target correspondences. The
analysis of the metaphor types is shown in Section 4.1. The source domains of the metaphors
are presented in Section 4.2. The target domains are presented in Section 4.3. The
correspondences between the sources and targets are discussed in Section 4.4. The temporal
relationship between speech and gestures in conveying metaphors is presented in Section 4.5.
Section 4.6 is a summary.
4.1 Cross-Modal Manifestation of Metaphors
The present study identifies different types of metaphor to classify the metaphoric
expressions obtained from the face-to-face conversations: body-part metaphor, causation
metaphor, conduit metaphor, container metaphor, entity metaphor, fictive-motion metaphor,
‧
orientation metaphor, personification metaphor, and complex metaphor. Most of the metaphor
types are found in the current data, but the expressions of body-part metaphor and
personification metaphor are not included in the current data. Distribution of the metaphor
types in Mandarin conversations is presented in Table 5.
Table 5. Types of metaphors in Mandarin conversations
Metaphor Type Example
In the language-gesture group, six metaphor types are found. A large number of the
expressions belong to entity metaphor (71.9%) and orientation metaphor (21.8%).
Fictive-motion metaphor, container metaphor, conduit metaphor, and complex metaphor
‧
comprise less than 10% of the metaphors in language and gesture. No causation metaphor is
realized by the metaphor in the language-gesture group. However, this finding does not imply
that causation metaphor exclusively belongs to the gesture-only group, since the current data
just involve one instance of this metaphor type. Within the gesture-only group, four metaphor
types are found. Entity metaphor is the overwhelming majority (82.5%), and orientation
metaphor takes the second place (13.9%). Causation metaphor and complex metaphor just
account for a small portion of metaphors in gesture-only. Instances of fictive-motion
metaphor, container metaphor, and conduit metaphor are not found in the metaphors
conveyed merely in gesture. The finding does not indicate that fictive-motion, container, and
conduit metaphors can merely occur in the language-gesture group because these metaphor
types are also rare in the language-gesture group (each metaphor type has less than three
tokens).
In both the language-gesture and the gesture-only groups, entity metaphor is the one
that people use more commonly to conceptualize metaphoric thoughts. Next to entity
metaphor, orientation metaphor is inclined to be expressed. The remaining metaphor types
are not as frequent as entity metaphor and orientation metaphor. The difference between the
language-gesture and the gesture-only groups is statistically significant regarding the
metaphor types.7 It is entity metaphor that causes the difference between the two groups.
7 The Chi-square test for the distribution of the metaphor types in the L-G group and that in the G-only group yields χ2.95(6) = 12.601 (p-value = 0.049). The standardized residuals for entity metaphor are -2.0 in the L-G group and 2.0 in the G-only group.
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Entity metaphors are prone to occur in the gesture-only group rather than the
language-gesture group. While speaking, we can profile a concept with the gestural imagery
of a bounded object supported in hand(s). For instance, the speaker literally expresses bàba
māmā hěn xīnkŭ ‘father and mother work hard’ in utterance in Example 2 in Section 3.2;
whereas, she naturally presents an object gesture to enact the entity metaphor HARD IS AN
OBJECT to emphasize the abstract idea of ‘hardship’. We can easily provide a boundary for a
concept by gesture; hence, it is likely that more entity metaphors are found in the
gesture-only group. The following introduces the cross-modal manifestations of each
metaphor type in the order based on their frequency.
With entity metaphors, we conceive target domains in terms of discrete objects or
substances. We are able to reason about abstract concepts with entity metaphor which may
allow us to group the concepts, quantify them, categorize them or identify aspects of them
(Lakoff & Johnson 1980c). In Example 7, OBJECT is employed with a view to quantified
speech contents. The metaphor SPEECH CONTENT IS AN OBJECT is manifested in both
language and gesture. The term
yìxiē ‘some’ (Line 1) is verbally expressed to quantify the
speech content, showing that SPEECH CONTENT is metaphorically conveyed as an object in
language. At the same time, the speaker’s right open palm faces up with slightly curled
fingers to represent SPEECH CONTENT as a discrete object held in her hand (Panel 2 in Figure
7).
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(7) 1 F1: ..蠻有用的..就你可能講一些什麼東西他可能覺得蠻有用他也..搞不好他也會聽一 2 下..因為他真的沒有別的事可以做啊
Figure 7. SPEECH CONTENT IS AN OBJECTin gesture
Example 8 presents another instance of the entity metaphor. The metaphor A GROUP
OF PEOPLE IS A BOUNDED AREA is manifested in gesture exclusively.The speaker explains
that all the players need to share the rent for the volleyball court. The speaker literally
expresses THE GROUP OF PEOPLE as
zhèxiē rén ‘these people’ in speech (Line 1).
Simultaneously, the speaker’s right hand moves counterclockwise to draw a scope with a
boundary (Panel 3 in Figure 8). This gesture represents the abstract concept of GROUP as a
bounded area which relates to the OBJECT image schema—a unified whole with a distinct
boundary. Lakoff and Johnson (1980c: 60) has proposed a similar metaphor SOCIAL GROUPS
ARE CONTAINERS, in which GROUP is not just a bounded object but a container with a
bounded surface. Because Example 8 only profiles the boundary, not the in-out orientation or
the interior of a container, the present study identifies the metaphoric expression about
GROUP as entity metaphor.
(8) 1 F1: (0)因為等於說你就這些人要分攤場地費..但是他要…確保我們打球的品質他每 2 次都控管人數
(1) (2)
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Figure 8. AGROUP OF PEOPLE IS A BOUNDED AREA in gesture
Orientation metaphors enable us to understand target domains in terms of spatial
concepts. Most of them are concerned with spatial orientation: up-down, front-back,
deep-shallow, central-periphery, and so on. Example 9 includes the orientation metaphors
MORNING IS UP and AFTERNOON IS DOWN in both language and gesture. The speaker says
that the teacher offering the classes in the morning and afternoon is from Germany. She utters
zăoshàng ‘morning’ and xiàwŭ ‘afternoon’ in speech. The spatial terms shàng ‘up’ and xià
‘down’ show that up-down orientation is used to refer to the abstract concept TIME. The
speaker’s left hand moves up when she utters
zăoshàng (Panel 2 in Figure 9), and her hand
moves down when she speakers
xiàwŭ (Panel 3). The gestures provide upward and downward
orientations for the abstract concept of time.
(9) F2: ..早上有...下午都是..德國那一個嗎
Figure 9. MORNING IS UP and AFTERNOON IS DOWN in gesture
(1) (2) (3)
(1) (2) (3)
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Another instance of orientation metaphor can be found in Example 10. The metaphor
HIGHTEMPERATURE IS UP is conveyed in both language and gesture. The speaker verbally
expresses
wēndù shàngshēng ‘temperature rise’ to conceptualize the increasing heat in terms
of the spatial concept UP. At the same time, her right hand rises up to enact the metaphor
(Panel 2 in Figure 10). The upward orientation made by gesture shows the metaphoric
thought about the degree of temperature.
(10) F: ...(0.7)然後其實現在地球的溫度已經有在上升所以現在好像
Figure 10. HIGHTEMPERATURE IS UP in gesture
PATH is a kind of spatial image schema on which orientation metaphors may be based.
In Lakoff (1993), he distinguished various aspects of event structure—states, changes,
process, actions, causes, purposes, and means—and asserted they may be metaphorically
characterized via space, motion, or force. The metaphor MEANS ARE PATHS (Lakoff 1993:
220) is a sub-mapping of the event structure metaphor.In the current data, we also find the
metaphoric expressions based on PATH as shown in Example 11.The speaker talks about his
experience of taking an examination and says what he has studied is in accordance with the
(1) (2)
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examination questions. The metaphor THE DIRECTION OF PREPARATION IS THE
DIRECTION OF PATH is conveyed in language and gesture concurrently. Path is a route for
the movement between two points, and the concept of PATH includes the notion about the
direction of the route. In this case, the speaker verbally expresses the phrase
zhŭnbèi de fāngxiàng ‘direction of the preparation’ (Line 2) which manifests the orientation metaphor
and profiles the direction of path. At the same time, the speaker’s hands move forward,
depicting the imagery of the path to metaphorically conceptualize the concept of
PREPARATION (Panel 3 in Figure 11).
(11) 1 M1: 有些就是...題目的深淺度就是..比較有差...對啊..就才會差在這個地方啊..就方向 2 都還算對準備的方向都還算對只是可能深淺就...可能還不夠這樣子
Figure 11. THEDIRECTION OF PREPARATION IS THE DIRECTION OF PATH in gesture
Fictive-motion metaphor allows us to conceive static things or abstract concepts in
terms of fictive motion which does not have physical occurrences. In Talmy’s (1996) study,
TIME PASSING IS MOTION is seen as a kind of metaphor based on fictive motion. This kind of
metaphor is widely discussed in studies in English and Chinese (Lakoff & Johnson 1980c;
Lakoff 1993; Yu 1998; Chui 2011). The current data have similar expressions like the
(1) (2) (3)
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metaphor shown in Example 12. The speaker says that she has realized that time has elapsed
rapidly since she entered high school. The metaphor THE PASSAGE OF A SEMESTER IS
MOTION is conveyed in both language and gesture. A semester does not actually move, but
the speaker linguistically represents the temporal progression of a semester with the verb guò
‘pass’ (Line 2). Simultaneously, the speaker’s left hand sweeps to the left for several times to
metaphorically express the passage of time through the motion (Panel 3 to 7 in Figure12).
(12) 1 F: 我自從上高中以後我就覺得時間過超快我覺得好像每三次段考...就就是..反正三 2 次段考...一下一下..一學期就過..半學期一學一學期就過了
Figure 12. THE PASSAGE OF A SEMESTER IS MOTION in gesture
(4) (5) (6) (1) (2) (3)
(7) (8) (9)
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Example 13 presents another instance of fictive-motion metaphor. The metaphor SHIFT
OF SPEECH CONTENT IS MOTION is realized in both language and gesture. The speaker states
that a teacher’s speech content always changes abruptly. The speech content of a
conversation does not move, but it is conceptualized in terms of fictive motion as the speaker
express the verb tiào ‘jump’ in the utterance. Moreover, the manner of the fictive motion is
also marked by the term tiào in language. At the same time, speaker’s one hand moves to
upper left or upper right position as the other hand stays in the center position for three times
(Panel 3 to 5 in Figure 13). The gestural imagery of the movement to different spaces
metaphorically represents the abstract concept, SHIFT OF THE SPEECH CONTENT,via motion.
(13) M: [講這邊也<L3 嘛想說L3>]這邊講又跳那邊..跳那邊..跳那邊這樣子啊
Figure 13. SHIFT OF THE SPEECH CONTENT IS MOTION in gesture
(1) (2) (3)
(4) (5) (6)
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With regard to container metaphor, we can conceptualize targets as the containers with
bounded surface and in-out orientation. In Example 14, the metaphor STOCK MARKET IS A
CONTAINER is manifested in both language and gesture. The speaker asks another participant
when will be the best time to buy stocks. A stock market is a virtual place without a physical
boundary. A stock market is conceived as a bounded container in the utterance j
ìnchăng ‘go
into the market’ which indicates the in-out orientation, an important notion relating to
CONTAINER. Simultaneously, the speaker’s hands move downward (Panel 3 in Figure 14);
this gesture represents the route to a container and profiles the in-out orientation.
(14) M1: ..學長你覺得最近在股市震盪期然後要..要進場還要再等一下就對了
Figure 14. STOCK MARKET IS A CONTAINER in gesture
We project our own in-out orientation onto the natural environment such as land areas
(Lakoff & Johnson 1980c). With container metaphor, we can impose a bounded surface to a
land area without a physical or delineated boundary. In the current data, we also find the
container metaphor about land area as shown in the metaphor TAIPEI BASIN IS A CONTAINER
in Example 15. The metaphor is realized by both language and gesture. The speaker says that
the terrain of Taipei is low-lying so Taipei is prone to flooding when the sea level is rising.
(1) (2) (3)
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The utterance
péndì zuāng shuĭ ‘basin is filled with water’ shows that a basin is seen as a
container. The physical land area is provided with artificial boundary which enables the land
to have the function of a container to keep liquid in its interior. The metaphor is also
expressed by the downward movement of the speaker’s hands which depicts the image of
pouring water into a container (Panel 3 in Figure 15) and shows the in-out orientation about
the concept of CONTAINER.
(15) F: ...然後台北也會..因為台北地勢低窪..[盆地..裝水]@@
Figure 15. TAIPEI BASIN IS A CONTAINER in gesture
In conduit metaphors, communication is understood in terms of a conduit which can
physically transfer our thoughts or feelings. This metaphor type involves an important
mechanism in which communication is seen as the action of sending. The current data merely
include an instance of conduit metaphor as shown in Example 16. The speaker says that the
(1) (2) (3)
(4)
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teachers taught well and that they had offered an abundance of knowledge to the students.
The metaphor PROVIDING KNOWLEDGE IS TRANSFERRING OBJECTS is conveyed in both
language and gesture. The speaker linguistically expresses the verb
guàn shū ‘transport’
(Line 2) which indicates that the process of providing knowledge is conceived as sending
discrete entities. The speaker also depicts the imagery of transferring something toward
herself twice by her hand movement (Panel 3 to 5 in Figure 16). Such a gesture is metaphoric
because it does not refer to the physical action of sending but the abstract concept of offering
because it does not refer to the physical action of sending but the abstract concept of offering