Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
14 Geometric and image-schematic patterns in gesture space
Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
Irene Mittelberg
RWTH Aachen University
Description
The main point of interest in this chapter is the spatialization of abstract information pertaining to grammatical concepts and theories. The author demonstrates that the prominent hand shapes and motion patterns that were found to recur across subject matters and speakers form a set of patterns which are reminiscent of simple geometric figures (e.g., squares, triangles, cubes, circles), as well as image and motor schemas proposed in the cognitive linguistics literature (e.g., object, path, balance, support, container, rotation; cf. Hampe 2005; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Mandler 1996, 2004; Talmy 1988).