visible evidence for the underlying embodiment of metonymic thoughts. They further bear out the dynamic nature of metonymic cognition, in that their real-time manifestations indicate which aspect of the conceptualization is the speaker’s focus of attention at the moment of speaking.
.
Database
The data used in this study come from three of the conversations: one is about friends in high school; one is about children’s toothpaste; the last one is about military service.
Gestural representations of conceptual metonymies
The empirical research in the present paper provided evidence that metonymic thought is readily conveyed by gesture exclusively or along with metonymic speech in daily face-to-face communication. Many of the linguistic metonymies were substantiated by the metonymic gestures in Chinese conversational discourse, including BODY-PART-FOR-A-MENTAL-EVENT, FACE-FOR-PERSON, THE-
BODY-PART-THAT-A-SUBSTANCE-IS-APPLIED-TO, and THE-POSSESSED-FOR-THE-POSSESSOR. All the metonymic gestures provide visible evidence for the grounding of conceptual metonymies in people’s recurrent perceptual and bodily experiences in dealing with remembrance, people’s appearance, and substances.
The enactment of even conventional metonymies in gesture, mainly performed in the central gesture space with noticeable and discernable configurations, provides salient, additional information about the aspect of the conceptualization that is the speaker’s focus of attention. It is a dynamic online depiction of metonymic thoughts. In the expression of conceptual metonymies, be it verbal or manual,
“[w]hich part we pick out determines which aspect of the whole we are focusing on” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 37). Thus, in our analysis of metonymies in gesture, the head, the face, the toothbrush, and the insignia are salient in talking about remembrance, a particular person, the
2 toothpaste, and the enlisted men respectively.
Finally, the parallel metonymic mappings of gesture and language bring us to the discussion about the relationship between gesture and language. This issue has been studied in different lines of research. Armstrong and Wilcox (2007) and Wilcox (2008) proposed an evolutionary link between them, in that the origins of human language can be traced to visible gestures. The neural integration of gesture and speech is supported by many neurolinguistic studies using neuroimaging techniques, among which Özyürek, Willems and Hagoort’s (2007a) fMRI study showed that action and language processing share a high-level neural integration system: Broca’s area can be modulated by action processing, and the premotor cortex can be modulated by the language context including physical actions. Gallese and Lakoff (2005) found that observing a metaphoric gesture may activate certain motor regions of the brain that could be linked to the embodied source domains of many metaphoric concepts. Lakoff (2008a, 2008b) also interpreted how metaphoric language and metaphoric gesture work in the brain with respect to the recent findings in neuroscience, such as mirror neurons, neural binding, and convergence zones. The evidence for cognitive linkage is based on various areas of research including gesture (see the editorial by Özyürek and Kelly 2007b, and the discussion in Núñez 2008:
94-95 and Núñez and Sweetser 2006: 19-20). The findings of the present study support such a cognitive connection between
In the future, novel metonymic gestures are worth investigating, since they can also reveal people’s creativity and dynamism in conceptualization, and the speaker’s focus of attention in real-time multimodal communication
the linguistic and imagistic representations of meonymies. The question then arises as to whether co-occurring gestures are best considered part of language structure. There is no consensus, but the findings here support the general view among the studies in Metaphor and Gesture (2008) that gesture and language are parts of the same system; “gesture is an inherent part of language – gestures work as signs communicating thought” (Lakoff 2008a: 284).
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