Emir Akbuga, who is currently post-doctoral researcher in English linguistics at LU, will present ongoing research on spatial representations (metaphors) of time, as well as overview of past work, involving representations in three semiotic systems: language, depiction and gesture! All are warmly welcome, from 15:00 for the usual round of introductions. Those who wish to join the post-seminar with Emir at Valvet, please send Jordan an email by April 6 (Monday).

Time is fundamental to human experience, yet it is an abstract and conceptually elusive domain. Despite this elusiveness, we systematically structure temporal experience and concepts through spatial representations. Individuals differ in how they orient toward the past and the future (de la Fuente et al., 2014), in the spatial perspectives they take regarding themselves and temporal events (Clark, 1973; among others), and in how they conceptualize duration (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2017). These different conceptualizations surface in and are shaped by metaphors in spoken language, time-related hand gestures, and visual representations that spatially organize time.

In this talk, I will first present my empirical work on the relationship between language and visual representations of the past and the future, featuring a task in which the participants arranged the locations of the past and future on a temporal diagram. I will then turn to time-related hand gestures, presenting evidence that such gestures reveal how speakers situate themselves with respect to temporal events. Finally, I will introduce our current project on language and duration, summarizing an ongoing experimental study and outlining future directions for investigating how language and gesture relate to the ways in which speakers of different languages conceptualize and estimate duration.

Clark, H. H. (1973). Space, time, semantics, and the child. In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (pp. 27–63). New York, NT: Academic Press.

de la Fuente, J., Santiago, J., Román, A., Dumitrache, C., & Casasanto, D. (2014). When you think about it, your past is in front of you: How culture shapes spatial conceptions of time. Psychological Science, 25(9), 1682–1690.

Bylund, E., & Athanasopoulos, P. (2017). The Whorfian time warp: Representing duration through the language hourglass. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146, 911–916.