30.42, Books: Chinese hands of time: Gu

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-42. Sat Jan 05 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.42, Books: Chinese hands of time: Gu

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Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2019 20:15:39
From: Karijn Hootsen [lot-fgw at uva.nl]
Subject: Chinese hands of time: Gu

 


Title: Chinese hands of time 
Subtitle: The effects of language and culture on temporal gestures and
spatio-temporal reasoning 
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series  

Publication Year: 2018 
Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)
	   http://www.lotpublications.nl/
	

Book URL: https://www.lotpublications.nl/chinese-hands-of-time-the-effects-of-language-and-culture-on-temporal-gestures-and-spatio-temporal-reasoning 


Author: Yan Gu

Paperback: ISBN:  9789460932922 Pages:  Price: Europe EURO 31.00


Abstract:

Across languages and cultures, people use space to represent time. In this
dissertation Chinese people’s conceptualisation of time is investigated, with
a focus on the production and perception of gestures, mental space-time
mappings, and cultural temporal values. These issues are studied
cross-culturally and within the Chinese culture, including analyses of
different Chinese populations.

The results show that, firstly, Chinese may have different mental space-time
mappings than Spaniards and Moroccans, in line with their different cultural
values towards time. Secondly, within the Chinese culture, Mandarin-English
bilingual speakers gesture differently about time when speaking Mandarin
Chinese than when speaking English. Thirdly, Mandarin speakers can gesture the
past to their front and the extent to which they perform
past-in-front/future-at-back mappings is sensitive to the wording of Mandarin
space-time metaphors. Furthermore, Mandarin-Chinese Sign Language (CSL)
bimodal bilinguals perform different temporal gestures than Mandarin-speaking
non-signers, even when both speak in their L1 Mandarin Chinese. Finally, deaf
users of CSL display a different spatio-temporal reasoning than Mandarin
speakers, and there is an effect of written Mandarin proficiency on signers’
spatio-temporal reasoning. All these studies suggest that there are not only
long-term effects of cultural attitudes on the spatialisation of time, but
also immediate effects of the linguistic space-time metaphors that probe
people’s mental representations. In conclusion, culture and language may not
simply influence how we think about time, but also shape the way we move our
hands to refer to time.

This dissertation may be of interest to researchers working on gestures,
bilingualism, language and cognition, and cross-linguistic/cultural
differences in space-time mappings.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science
                     Pragmatics

Subject Language(s): Chinese, Mandarin (cmn)


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=131953




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