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.0The 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.

In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses, on the assumption that by interrogating creativity, new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity, which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume, endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema, music, graphic novels, etc.), but also its more ‘mundane’, everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use, political discourse, or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal, pictorial, auditory, and gestural), the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.

This book explores how we move our hands when we talk, and what it means when we do so. Focusing on what we can discover about speakers—adults and children alike—by watching their hands, Goldin-Meadow discloses the active role that gesture plays in conversation and, more fundamentally, in thinking.

When Mao and the Chinese Communist Party won power in 1949, they were determined to create new, revolutionary human beings. Their most precise instrument of ideological transformation was a massive program of linguistic engineering. They taught everyone a new political vocabulary, gave old words new meanings, converted traditional terms to revolutionary purposes, suppressed words that expressed "incorrect" thought, and required the whole population to recite slogans, stock phrases, and scripts that gave "correct" linguistic form to "correct" thought. They assumed that constant repetition would cause the revolutionary formulae to penetrate people's minds, engendering revolutionary beliefs and values. In an introductory chapter, Dr. Ji assesses the potential of linguistic engineering by examining research on the relationship between language and thought. In subsequent chapters, she traces the origins of linguistic engineering in China, describes its development during the early years of communist rule, then explores in detail the unprecedented manipulation of language during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. Along the way, she analyzes the forms of linguistic engineering associated with land reform, class struggle, personal relationships, the Great Leap Forward, Mao-worship, Red Guard activism, revolutionary violence, Public Criticism Meetings, the model revolutionary operas, and foreign language teaching. She also reinterprets Mao’s strategy during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, showing how he manipulated exegetical principles and contexts of judgment to "frame" his alleged opponents. The work concludes with an assessment of the successes and failures of linguistic engineering and an account of how the Chinese Communist Party relaxed its control of language after Mao's death.

One of the most enigmatic aspects of experience concerns time. Since pre-Socratic times scholars have speculated about the nature of time, asking questions such as: What is time? Where does it come from? Where does it go? The central proposal of The Structure of Time is that time, at base, constitutes a phenomenologically real experience. Drawing on findings in psychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may ultimately derive from perceptual processes, which in turn enable us to perceive events. As such, temporal experience is a pre-requisite for abilities such as event perception and comparison, rather than an abstraction based on such phenomena. The book represents an examination of the nature of temporal cognition, with two foci: (i) an investigation into (pre-conceptual) temporal experience, and (ii) an analysis of temporal structure at the conceptual level (which derives from temporal experience).