Mental Timeline in Persian Speakers’ Co-Speech Gestures Based on Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory

One of the well-known conceptual metaphors is the metaphor of "time as space". Time as an abstract concept is conceptualized by a concrete concept like space. This conceptualization of time is also reflected in co-speech gestures. In this research, we try to find out what dimension and direction the mental timeline takes in co-speech gestures and under which metaphorical sources of space it takes place. For this purpose, six possible metaphorical sources adopted from space on three axes of sagittal, lateral, and vertical in six spatial directions were examined on the words tomorrow and yesterday. Participants were 137 students ranging in age from 18 to 30. The frequency of occurrence and the average percentage in co-speech gestures showed that the horizontal-sagittal axis back to front adopted from metaphorical-spatial source of linguistic metaphors with 55.75%; and right to left horizontal-lateral axis adopted from metaphorical-spatial source of Persian writing direction with 30.1% were the two influential factors in activating these dimensions and directions. The results of this study showed that language can play an important role in the representation of the mental timeline in co-speech gestures through the embodied sensory-motor experiences that we have from language as a conventional-cultural artifact in writing or linguistic metaphors.