We present preliminary results of a new methodology to study co-speech gesture in relation to specific linguistic structures. We draw on a large-scale video repository with time-aligned transcripts to build corpora in which the same linguistic expression is uttered by different speakers across multiple clips. We then extract dynamic coordinates of key body points to model their variation in relation with what is being said. In this paper, we present analyses of the distribution of wrist motion in gesture space for a dataset of 379 videos with utterances of 44 deictic time expressions in English (words or phrases pointing at the past, present, or future in relation to a center of temporal reference, e.g. “yesterday/today/tomorrow”). Even overall distributions of wrist positions in peripheral areas of gestural motion turn out to be influenced by these semantic distinctions. More fine-grained models are to be expected from the reconstruction of gestural trajectories, based on the chronological sequence of positions detected in each video. These initial results already suggest that so-called non-verbal behavior is deeply structured and attuned to language, quite beyond our current understanding. Once scaled up, such models have the potential to dramatically change any technologies connected to human communicative behavior.

This article reviews the major take-home points of Gilles Fauconnier’s work, especially of his collaborative work with Mark Turner on blending theory, for readers who are not familiar with this theoretical framework or who could benefit from an external perspective. I emphasize the overarching lessons to be learned from the notions of mental spaces and their connections or mappings, the advantages of using small packages instead of large domains to analyze conceptual work, how integration networks allow us to go beyond mere projections or correspondences between domains of experience, and the need to study patterns that provide a bridge between the general principles and the rich, contextualized examples that expose them. Above all, I seek to transmit Gilles Fauconnier’s message about the fascination, curiosity, ambition, and humility required by the most challenging scientific enterprise possible: understanding the human mind, from the most general principles down to the meaning of a single sentence.

This chapter seeks to expose individual traits and recurrent trends in how authors exploit the universal creative capacities of the human mind for their particular aesthetic goals. The focus will be on the figurative language of emotions in the lyric, where, despite the daunting variety, cross-cultural meaning construction patterns arise from the cognitive operations underlying spatial schemas and the mapping and integration of mental structures. To model these templates across examples from different authors in Western literary traditions, I will combine image schemas and blending theory into a model that goes beyond the sheer understanding of one thing in terms of another. The model will also allow for theoretical claims about how individual creativity takes advantage of the patterns arising from these cognitive skills, thus suggesting some initial steps to explain the great variety in emotion imagery that we observe across authors, but with a basis on structural similarities.

Abstract It is assumed that humans use spatial concepts to think and speak about time. In this chapter we analyze the spatialization of time in five different literary and non-literary corpora by looking at the frequency with which time units (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and centuries) appear as the subject of a motion verb. The results reveal that there is a tendency to spatialize time more often in literature – especially in lyric poetry – than in other non-literary linguistic contexts. This supports the idea that meaning construction cannot be reduced to a direct transfer-based model, but rather requires an elaborate network of conceptual integration that opportunistically – and creatively – adjusts mappings and integrations to goals.

Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary isolation of musical composition from cognitive science, in this conceptual analysis, we approach compositional processes with the analytic tools of blending theory, material anchoring, and enaction. Our case study is Iannis Xenakis’ use of sieves for distributing rhythmic patterns in Psappha. Though disregarded in previous accounts, the timeline and the gearwheel provide crucial conceptual templates for anchoring Xenakis’ idea of time for this score. This case study of conceptual integration templates for temporal representation seeks to gain insight into musical creativity, embodiment, and blending, especially into how virtual interactions with material structures facilitate the construction of complex meanings.

AbstractThe chunking problem is central to linguistics, semiotics, and poetics: How do we learn to organize a language into patterns and to use those patterns creatively? Linguistics has mainly offered two answers, one based on rule inference through innate capacities for processing and the other based on usage and on outstanding capacities for memory and retrieval. Both views are based on induction and compositionality. The Parry–Lord theory of oral composition-in-performance has argued that oral singers produce complex poems out of rehearsed improvisation through the mastery of a system of formulas, chunks that integrate phrasal, metrical, and semantic structures. The framework of formulaic creativity proposed here argues that the cognitive study of oral poetics can provide crucial insights into the chunking problem. I show the major connections between Parry–Lord and usage-based cognitive linguistics, mainly Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics. However, these approaches still remain compositional and thus struggle to model creativity and learning in oral poetry and everyday speech. The alternative is to explore a model of formulaic creativity not based on compositional patterns, but on wide learning for connecting discriminative perceptual features directly to semantic contrasts within a complex dynamic system, without the intermediation of a set of discrete units.

What takes place in the minds of composers when they struggle to incorporate a given temporal concept into a musical work? Spectral composers have produced detailed theoretical proposals about time in music, but how exactly those ideas influenced their musical practices remains an extremely challenging question. Graphical representations in their sketches provide invaluable clues. Through the analyses of Gérard Grisey’s and Kaija Saariaho’s manuscripts, we show how the theoretical frameworks for the basic cognitive operations of blending and anchoring, which underlie the construction of complex meanings, can shed light on the intricate musical uses of timelines by spectral composers. We combine the universal claims of this cognitive analysis with the diachronic perspective of a musicological study, teasing out the mental paths that these composers may have followed to create novel aesthetic proposals from their experience with graphic representations of sound, mainly spectrograms, and from techniques of electroacoustic studios. Thus we pave the way towards a common language for understanding time representation across electroacoustics and music in general, based on this mixed methodology. Through such shared tenets, the cognitive study of music can reciprocally contribute to burgeoning fields such as time representation, meaning construction and creativity.

This chapter will explore the embodied, enacted and embedded nature of co-speech gestures in the meaning-making process of time conceptualization. We will review three different contextualized communicative exchanges extracted from American Television interviews. First, we will offer a step-by-step form description of the different gesture realizations performed by the speakers as well as a brief description of the gaze fixation patterns. After that, we will offer a functional analysis which will interpret the gesturing patters in terms of their communicative goals on their respective communicative contexts as well as the complex interplay between verbal and non-verbal communication. The resulting interaction between speech, gesture and other bodily movements give rise to a dynamic system that allows for the construction of highly complex meanings: time co-speech gestures play a crucial role in the simulation of virtual anchors for complex mental networks that integrate conceptual and perceptual information.

Psycholinguistic evidence shows that spatial domains are automatically activated when processing temporal expressions. Speakers conceptualize time as a straight line deployed along different axes (mostly sagittal, though also vertical). The use of the lateral axis, which cannot be lexicalized in any language, has nonetheless been attested in temporal tasks in laboratories using a variety of experiments. This leads to the question of what axes are actually at work when conceptualizating time in oral communication. The present study examines a great number of temporal expressions, taken from television shows, noting their associated co-speech gestures. Our results show that (1) speakers overwhelmingly use the lateral axis; (2) they are not performing simple space-to-time mappings, but are using instead a "timeline", a material anchor which is a far more complex construct and that can explain some of the intricacies and contextual variations shown in the pattern of results.

The development of large-scale corpora has led to a quantum leap in our understanding of speech in recent years. By contrast, the analysis of massive datasets has so far had a limited impact on the study of gesture and other visual communicative behaviors. We utilized the UCLA-Red Hen Lab multi-billion-word repository of video recordings, all of them showing communicative behavior that was not elicited in a lab, to quantify speech-gesture co-occurrence frequency for a subset of linguistic expressions in American English. First, we objectively establish a systematic relationship in the high degree of co-occurrence between gesture and speech in our subset of expressions, which consists of temporal phrases. Second, we show that there is a systematic alignment between the informativity of co-speech gestures and that of the verbal expressions with which they co-occur. By exposing deep, systematic relations between the modalities of gesture and speech, our results pave the way for the data-driven integration of multimodal behavior into our understanding of human communication.

Conceptual metaphor theory has used TIME IS SPACE as the paradigmatic case of projection from a concrete to an abstract domain. More recently, within the framework of conceptual integration or blending theory, a more complex view of time–space mappings—and of mappings in general—has been proposed. Rather than a binary, unidirectional projection between the vast experiential domains of TIME and SPACE, the blending account proposes that meanings combining time and motion emerge from successive integrations within a network of relatively small conceptual packets, including event structure, motion from A to B, and a cultural mechanism for measuring duration. We examine how poetic effects can be created by using the conventional opportunities provided by this conceptual template, as well as by manipulating the path (with a linear or circular shape), one of the basic spatial features in this representation. We analyze examples in Greek, English, and Spanish.

We relate improvisation in epic singing to cognitive linguistics, postulating that oral formulas are acquired analogous to phrasal patterns in language. Singers' use of reporting phrases in six performances of a South-Slavic epic reveals (1) a “prototypical” construction; (2) a difference in its use between audio recording and dictation; (3) a motivation behind its variations lying not in metrical conditions alone, but also in meaning and function. When sung, introductions containing monosyllabic function words prevail, which remains stable across different singers, the same singer through time, and variations in the narrative. When dictated, few monosyllabic items are used. Analysis of the poems' plot suggests that these function words do not just fill in metrical slots, but rather affect narrative structure.

The understanding of time in spatial terms (“The hour is approaching”) has become the most studied case of conceptual projection in the cognitive sciences. However, the predominant models of direct transfer from the concrete to the abstract, from space to time, do not account even for many conventional meanings, such as the subjective value of speed (“The hour is approaching fast”). Poetic examples such as Ende’s Momo, where fast and slow are reversed in a meaningful paradox, show the need for a network model based on blending. The network model of blending theory can provide crucial insights into the goal-driven processes for the mapping and integration of concepts, into the complex nature of the templates connecting mental structures, and into the relation between cultural-cognitive patterns, creativity, and context. For this, it is necessary to focus not only on the cognitive operations of mapping and blending but also on the templates that arise from them and on the know-how that comes with these templates, which are always geared toward purposeful usage in context. Time is very often not time itself, but what we want to make of it. In the ways in which we integrate it with emotions, intentions, and social or cultural background we can find precious keys to understand not only time concepts but also imagination and thought in general.

Despite the exponential growth of metaphor studies in recent decades, personification has nonetheless remained overshadowed by other types of metaphor. Specifically, it has been suggested that not all personifications are equal in that they vary considerably in linguistic, conceptual and communicative terms. In this paper, we argue that personification indeed features cultural diversity and stylistic creativity, yet its expression is underpinned by a shared conceptual structure along the lines of a generic integration template. Drawing on data from poetic discourse, we focus on a particular domain, that of time, and its various personified manifestations in four languages (English, Modern Greek, French and Spanish). We show that time personification is grounded in an Abstract Cause Personification template, in which the cause of an event is mapped onto an agent that performs an action that results in that same event (e.g., 'cancer killed him'). This causal tautology (that in the case of time amounts to the time is a changer metaphor) can then be further blended with yet another agent, which acts in a more concrete scenario (e.g., 'Time is a great healer'). In the case of time, in particular, the cross-linguistic evidence we examine points to a generic personified construal that we dub Time the Enemy (cf. Death the Grim Reaper and Eros the Archer).

We analyze a group of literary motifs for building fictive interactions, recurring across one of the richest examples of affective communication in Greek literature: the expression of the causes and effects of love in terms of scenes between lover and beloved. In this thematic set, the poetic expression of love is articulated through a direct or indirect interaction between lover and beloved. We expose the main patterns for the integration of concepts that recur across such interactions, showing how entrenched cognitive templates interplay with different cultural contexts and aesthetic goals. Across different periods, authors blend a variety of conceptual elements, producing different levels of fantasy and mediation between the lover's viewpoint and the beloved's 'reality'. Although there is significant variation in how these scenes are built across periods and genres, they all share a core structure and a number of flexible rules that are based on fundamental cognitive operations. Understanding this cognitive core allows us to model how the meaning is built by the different texts. Examining how particular texts use the template for their specific purposes shows us that cognitive structures with arguably a universal nature are not rigid patterns but fluid recipes, providing starting points for creating novel meanings through skillful usage.

This paper proposes to rethink the study of oral performativity in the context of modern cognitive science. To that end, we list a number of so-far unrecognized parallels between the Parry-Lord theory of composition in performance and what has come to be known as “usage-based” approaches to grammar and language acquisition in the field of Cognitive Linguistics. We develop these connections into an integrated whole, opening up the way for a research program in the new field of “cognitive oral poetics”, and relating it to a number of very topical questions in present-day cognitive science (creativity, language acquisition, multimodality). The conclusion vouches for a closer collaboration of literary theorists, linguists, and cognitive scientists in the establishment of cognitive oral poetics.

Research on image schemas in language and cognition (containment, path, blockage, etc.) is largely based on de-contextualized linguistic expressions. This results in a view of image schemas as somehow detached from experience, constituting source domains for fixed conceptual projections from the concrete to the abstract. By showcasing creative examples of the poetics of containment throughout the long diachrony of Greek poetry, this article proposes that image schemas reflect the early attentional preferences of the human mind. These central features of image schemas are further selected for their suitability to create ad-hoc, non-perceptual meanings. Templates for conceptual integration involving image schemas also offer coherent patterns of variation, which opportunistically exploit arising connections with culture, context, and goals. Understanding the role of image schemas in meaning construction and verbal art requires the study of both the entrenched patterns and the know-how associated to their usage.

The notions of construction and formula are, respectively, the main currencies of cognitive grammar and the theory of oral-formulaic composition in performance. Even though they originated independently, both formulas and constructions are defined as form-meaning-function patterns, and, as such, represent the central theoretical constructs in their respective fields. In this chapter we propose a connection between these two research traditions, in the hope this will open up new vistas for scholars in oral poetics, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive science. To examine how connecting these two approaches may provide new insights, we first compare the frameworks of construction grammar and the Parry-Lord theory of oral composition in performance, paying particular attention to the (often problematic) definitions of the concepts of oral formula and grammatical construction, showing that the two are based on very similar foundations. We then go on to suggest how both approaches can complement one another, outlining the connections between some of their major interests and recent developments. Finally, we illustrate our ideas with an analysis of a formula highlighted by Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales, using the methodological apparatus of construction grammar. Our conclusion is that this combination of the two approaches can help us reach a better understanding of both formulas and constructions, as well as build the foundations for an interdisciplinary field of cognitive oral poetics. This new field, we hope, will have the potential to provide important insights into not only verbal art, but also into language and cognition in general, especially in the domains of generalization in language, language acquisition, and the relation between verbal form and conceptual structure.