Time on hands

Deliberate and spontaneous temporal gestures

by speakers of Mandarin

Heng Li
Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, China, and
Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

The present study investigates deliberate and spontaneous temporal gestures in

Mandarin speakers. The results of our analysis show that when asked to gesture
about past and future events deliberately (Study 1), Mandarin speakers tend
to mimic space-time mappings in their spoken metaphors or graphic conven-
tions for time in Chinese culture, including sagittal mappings (front/past, back/
future), vertical mappings (up/past, down/future), and lateral mappings (left/
past, right/future). However, in their spontaneous co-speech gestures about time
(Study 2), more congruent gestures were produced on the lateral axis than on the
vertical axis. This suggests that although Mandarin speakers could think about
time vertically, they still showed a horizontal bias in their conceptions of time.
Speakers were also more likely to gesture according to future-in-front mappings
despite more past-in-front mappings found in spoken Chinese, suggesting a dis-
sociation of temporal language and temporal thought. These results demonstrate
that gesture is useful for revealing the spatial conceptualization of time.

Keywords: space, time, metaphor, Mandarin, gesture

Introduction

Spatial metaphors for time are ubiquitous across most spoken and signed lan-
guages throughout the world. According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, met-
aphor offers a way to better understand the abstract domain TIME by utilizing
corresponding knowledge from a more concrete domain SPACE (Evans, 2004;
Haspelmath, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Moore, 2014; Núñez & Cooperrider,
2013). Linguists found that there are two distinct perspectives when people talk
about time (Clark, 1973; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Moore, 2006): one from the

Gesture 16:3 (2017), 396–415. doi 10.1075/gest.00002.li

issn 1568–1475 / e-issn 1569–9773 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Time on hands 397

deictic perspective of the speaker as the experiencer of the flow of time (e.g., “We’re
approaching Christmas”), the other from the sequential perspective in which the
speaker is speaking about the relative timing of events regardless of his position
in time in relation to these events (e.g., “Monday comes before Wednesday”). This
distinction of temporal perspectives can not only be observed in linguistic expres-
sions, but also influence time expressions in gesture. Calbris (2011, pp. 129–132),
in her studies on French speakers, found that people tend to situate the present
on the vertical axis of their body by pointing downward and to indicate the recent
past by moving the thumb or turning the head backwards over the shoulder when
talking about deictic time. However, when one wants to express the sequential
time, one’s reference point is no longer the present moment situated on the ver-
tical axis of the body but localized on the vertical axis of the hand held in front
of the body. An earlier event was indicated by moving the hand backwards and
towards oneself and a later event was indicated by moving the hand forwards and
away from oneself.
Despite the universality of linguistic mappings between time and space in
human languages, the extent of cultural diversity of spatial metaphors for time
should not be underestimated as noted by Radden (2011). For instance, in English
and many other European languages, the spatial concepts of “front” and “back”
are used to construct time, mapping the future to the locations in front of the
observer and past to locations behind her (Clark, 1973; Evans, 2004). Mandarin,
however, also makes use of vertical metaphors for time, one that is rare for English.
According to this vertical metaphor, “shang (up)” is associated with earlier times,
and “xia (down)” with later times (Yu, 1998). The systematicity and diversity of
spatial metaphors for time in language have spurred a call for scientific research
on their psychological reality. A significant body of research has answered this call
in recent years, showing that temporal gesture is useful in revealing the spatial
dimensions of temporal thought (for a review, see Kendon, 1993; Cooperrider,
Núñez, & Sweetser, 2014). First, temporal gesture can provide evidence for the
psychological reality of space-time mappings in spoken metaphors. For instance,
Núñez and colleagues in a productive line of work on temporal gestures in Aymara,
found that past-front/future-behind temporal gestures were widely used by elderly
Aymara speakers, confirming that the Aymara past-front/future-behind linguis-
tic metaphor is cognitively real (Núñez, Neumann, & Mamani, 1997; Núñez &
Sweetser, 2006). Second, temporal gesture can reveal implicit spatialization of time
that is absent from spoken language. Cienki (1998) found that English speakers
employed the left-right axis to conceptualize time, gesturing leftward for earlier
times and rightward for later times, suggesting that gesture could provide com-
plementary information that is unavailable from spoken metaphors. Third, tem-
poral gesture may demonstrate a dissociation between the way participants talk
398 Heng Li

about time and the way they conceptualize it in their minds. Casasanto and Jasmin
(2012), in their studies on English speakers’ temporal gestures, found that people
produce gestures on the lateral axis even when they are using deictic front/back
metaphors in their co-occurring speech. Finally, people can systematically com-
bine different spatial metaphors for time in their gestures, although they cannot do
so in their speech. Walker and Cooperrider (2016) found that half of their English
participants tended to produce at least one doubly congruent co-speech gesture
when talking about deictic time. That is, the gesture’s directionality was congruent
for both of the axes as the spoken metaphors and graphic conventions in English-
speaking cultures suggest.
Recent initial lines of research on temporal gesture have been used to re-eval-
uate Boroditsky’s (2001) claim that vertical metaphors in Chinese cause speakers
to think about time vertically. Gu, Mol, Hoetjs, and Swerts conducted a number
of production experiments to investigate Chinese temporal gestures. In one pro-
duction experiment, Gu, Mol, Hoetjs, and Swerts (2013) found that participants
were more likely to produce vertical gestures when defining time phrases contain-
ing explicit lexical references to verticality (especially when using deictic vertical
metaphors) than those in the neutral words condition, suggesting that using time
phrases with vertical spatial metaphors has an online effect on the production of
vertical gestures. However, the total number of horizontal gestures was twice that
of vertical gestures, suggesting that Mandarin speakers showed no vertical bias in
their conceptions of time. Although Gu et al. (2013) distinguish different temporal
perspectives in their stimuli, they failed to provide sufficient information about
the number of gestures produced for each type of wordlist. Thus, little is known
about which temporal perspectives these speakers adopted when they were using
horizontal and vertical gestures. Further experiments investigated late Chinese-
English bilinguals in which participants were asked to define four deictic time-
related concepts and their English counterparts (Gu, Mol, Hoetjs, & Swerts, 2014).
The results showed that the number of vertical gestures for wordlists with vertical
spatial metaphors was significantly higher in Chinese than in the English transla-
tion. However, the same pattern could not found in the case of wordlists with neu-
tral words because there was no significant difference in the number of co-speech
vertical gestures between the two languages; thus, indicating that Chinese speak-
ers’ vertical bias in their conception of time are not predetermined by the different
language specific conceptualizations of time in Chinese and English.
In addition to vertical temporal gestures, some research also focused on the
taxonomy of sagittal time gesture types in Chinese. Taking a qualitative approach,
Chui (2011) found that Chinese speakers exhibited two types of temporal perspec-
tives in their temporal gestures as their language suggests. In the time-moving
perspective, they moved their hands forward when talking about the past. By
 Time on hands 399

contrast, in the ego-moving perspective, they gestured backward when referring

to yesterday. Taken together, despite recent studies investigating the relationship
between temporal language and temporal gestures in Mandarin speakers, a quan-
titative analysis of the gestural representation of time in three-dimensional space
remains elusive. The present study is designed to fill that void. Here, we report two
quantitative studies in more controlled laboratory experiments to see how time
is spatialized in deliberate and spontaneous gestures. In the first study, we asked
participants to produce deliberate gestures that they thought would best describe
time directions. In the second study, we analyzed the spontaneous gestures accom-
panying speech related to time concepts in a word-explanation task. These two
types of data constituted controlled lab experiments involving deliberate gestures
and spontaneous gestures, opening up a unique window to see the possible spatial
schemas activated in Mandarin speakers’ mind when talking about time.

Study 1. Deliberate temporal gestures

Methods
Participants
Thirty right-handed students (15 female) volunteered to participate in an experi-
ment on gesture at a university in Beijing. All participants were native speakers of
Mandarin.

Materials and procedure

We used the prompts adapted from Casasanto and Jasmine (2012, Experiment 1).
It is well established as a reliable measure to directly elicit temporal gestures in
previous studies (Casasanto & Jasmine, 2012; Walker & Cooperrider, 2016). The
prompts consisted of four types of questions about events happening in the past
and the future. Each participant was asked two pairs of questions. One pair used
deictic reference, describing past and future relationships relative to the present
moment. The other pair referred to earlier and later relationships relative to an-
other moment in time. In the two types of directional language, both sagittal axis
(e.g., 以后 lit. back in the future; 以前 lit. ahead in the past) and vertical axis (e.g.,
上个月 lit. up (last) month; 下个月 down (next) month) were included, which
makes a total of 6 pairs of questions (see Appendix). Two groups of participants
heard questions with directional language (sagittal or vertical) respectively, and
the other group heard non-directional language. The orders of Past/Future and
Deictic/Sequential versions of questions were counterbalanced across the partici-
400 Heng Li

pants to avoid confounding time ‘direction’ and types of temporal reasoning with
numerical or temporal order.

Coding and reliability

Gestures were analyzed by two independent coders, who were completely naive
regarding the real purpose of this study. Two coders performed an analysis of the
gestures of each video (without audio). Each of the gesture strokes identified was
coded according to the direction (leftward, rightward, backward, forward, up-
ward, downward). After the coding was complete, gestures were then analyzed
for congruency.
Congruency between gestures and mappings of time was determined as fol-
lows: sagittal and vertical gestures were coded as congruent or incongruent with
mappings of time as suggested by linguistic metaphors in Mandarin. Thus, up-
ward/forward past/earlier gestures and downward/backward future/later gestures
were considered congruent.1 For gestures produced along the lateral axis, leftward
past/earlier gestures and rightward future/later gestures were coded as congruent
according to the graphic conventions for time in Chinese culture.
Inter-coder agreement for the stroke direction was 89 percent, indicating a
good agreement was achieved between the two coders.

Results and discussion

The gestures were tabulated according to orientation (sagittal; vertical; lateral) and
direction (away from the body; toward the body; upward; downward; leftward;
rightward). Among the 120 gestures that were produced by the participants, 38
were produced along the lateral axis, 40 along the vertical axis and 42 along the
sagittal axis. The majority of gestures produced (80.8%) were congruent with the

1. Although Mandarin speakers can either adopt a future-in-front or a past-in-front mapping

for time in their language, one area that has received comparatively less attention is whether
these two mappings are used in a symmetrical way. Some research provided initial evidence
that there are more past-in-front mappings than future-in-front mappings in spoken Mandarin
(Alverson, 1994). One reviewer raises the question of whether past/earlier-in-front mappings
are in fact more frequent in natural production. In order to assess the frequency of the two
space-time mappings, we refer to Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (5th edition), also known as the
Contemporary Chinese Dictionary. This is an authoritative one-volume Chinese language dic-
tionary. Under the entry word “qian (front)”, there are a total of 154 instances of time metaphor.
Of these, 98 instances refer to past or earlier concepts and only 18 instances refer to future or
later concepts. Under the entry word “hou (back)”, there are a total of 156 instances of time met-
aphors. Of these, 23 instances refer to past or earlier concepts and 83 instances refer to future or
later concepts. Thus, we chose the dominant mapping (past/earlier = front, future/later = back)
as the standard to measure the congruity of sagittal axis.
 Time on hands 401

axis mappings suggested by the linguistic metaphors and cultural conventions

(30/38 lateral, 32/40 vertical; 35/42 sagittal, Figure 1). Concretely, the majority of
gestures were congruent along the lateral axis, leftward for past/earlier and right-
ward for future/later (sign test on 30 vs. 8, p = .005). Similarly, the majority of
gestures were congruent along the vertical axis, upward for past/earlier and down-
ward for future/later (sign test on 32 vs. 8, p = .0002). The majority of gestures
were also congruent along the sagittal axis, forward for past/earlier and backward
for future/later (sign test on 35 vs. 7, p < .0001).
To examine the influence of linguistic metaphors and graphic conventions in
Chinese culture on people’s deliberate gestures, we broke down the data by three
conditions (see Table 1 for a detailed summary of the (in) congruent gestures on
the three axes). These results indicate an influence of linguistic metaphors and the
direction of reading and writing on people’s deliberate temporal gestures. People
were more likely to produce gestures in line with the space-time mappings in
linguistic or graphic conventions. Although deliberate gestures provide a useful
method for capturing how people gesture about time, some scholars have warned
that conclusions drawn from explicitly elicited gestures alone should be interpret-
ed with caution (e.g., Walker & Núñez, 2016). For instance, when speakers are
explicitly asked to gesture about time, they may be more likely to rely on linguistic
information about the time-related concepts (e.g., since Chinese speaker say “up
month”, they will gesture by moving upward along the vertical axis). To this end,
in Study 2, we sought to examine whether Mandarin speakers construe time in the
same ways in their spontaneous co-speech gestures which is shown to be a more
ecologically valid approach.

100 Sagittal
90 Verstical
Lateral
80
70
60
50
(%)
40
30
20
10
0
Study 1 Study 2
Figure 1. Proportion of congruent gestures on the different axes of Study 1 and 2
402 Heng Li

Table 1. The number of (in) congruent gestures on the three axes of Study 1
Lateral Vertical Sagittal
Types of question Congruent Total Congruent Total Congruent Total
Directional, Vertical 5 5 32 35 0 0
Directional, Sagittal 5 6 0 2 25 32
Non-directional 20 27 0 3 10 10

Study 2. Spontaneous temporal gestures

Methods
Participants
Thirty native-Chinese speaking students (15 females) at a university in Beijing
were recruited and paid for their participation. All were right-handed.

Materials
A list of twenty-four Chinese words modeled after Walker and Cooperrider (2016)
was generated to evoke spontaneous temporal gestures: eight are time-related con-
cepts (e.g., past; future)and sixteen are fillers (e.g., power; happiness). We split the
list into two randomized lists that each comprised: four time words and eight filler
words. Each participant received both lists. The orders of word list presentation
were counterbalanced across the participants.

Procedure
A research assistant came to the study with the participant and served as a listener
so as to evoke more gestures (Parrill, 2011). Participants were instructed that they
would be presented with a list of 24 Chinese words which they were to define as
clearly as possible to help Chinese beginners to understand the words. Participants
were told they would have 30 seconds to define each word. The words to be defined
were presented on a large screen on the wall. One word was replaced automatically
by the next after 30 seconds. Debriefing responses indicated that no participants
guessed there was any connection between time words and temporal gesture.

Coding
The data were separately coded by two trained coders, who learned the criteria
that had been established. First, one coder isolated and rated the temporal content
of each spoken clause as follows: if it contained the pre-determined set of target
words or other time words, it was classified as a ‘target clause’ and was then passed
 Time on hands 403

on to the next coders. If a clause did not contain any temporal events, it was clas-
sified as a ‘non-target’ clause and was thus not included for further analysis. These
classifications were based on the transcription in Word (without gestures). Then,
two coders watched the entire video (with the audio) and identified the gestures,
which accompanied an utterance describing a target clause. Gestures were coded
in terms of the stroke phase: that is, “the meaningful part of the gestural movement
where the spatial excursion of the limb reaches its apex” (Gullberg, Hendriks, &
Hickmann, 2008, p. 213). Coding the stroke phase allowed us to identify the ori-
entation and direction of motion, as in Study 1. In cases of which many gesture
strokes showing more than one direction, only the dominant direction was re-
corded by coders. Reliability was calculated on the absolute agreement by the two
independent coders. Agreement between coders was 86% in categorizing gestures.

Results and discussion

Participants produced 273 gestures with a clearly codable direction. Of these ges-
tures, 161 (59%) gestures were produced along the lateral axis, 78 (28.6%) along
the vertical axis, and 34 (12.4%) along the sagittal axis. The majority of gestures
were congruent along the lateral axis, leftward for past/earlier and rightward for
future/later (sign test on 141 vs. 20, p < .001). Similarly, the majority of gestures
were congruent along the vertical axis, upward for past/earlier and downward for
future/later (sign test on 65 vs. 13, p < .001). However, the majority of gestures
were incongruent along the sagittal axis, suggesting that Mandarin speakers tend-
ed to gesture according to the future/later -in-front mappings (sign test on 24 vs.
10, p = .02). To determine whether the difference in the use of axes was signifi-
cant, a Friedman test for an ordinal dependent variable was used. The Friedman
test revealed that the congruity rate differed significantly among the three axes
(χ2 = 56.12, df = 2, p < .001) (Figure 1). Post-hoc analysis showed that people were
more likely to use the lateral axis than the vertical axis (p < .001) and people were
more likely to use the vertical axis than the sagittal axis (p < 0.001).
To summarize the results of Study 2, Mandarin speakers were more likely to
use the lateral axis than the vertical axis or the sagittal axis overall (see Figure 1),
appearing to run counter to the prediction that Mandarin speakers tend to think
of time vertically (Boroditsky, 2001). Mandarin speakers produced the fewest
sagittal gestures when talking about time, which is parallel to the finding that
English speakers rarely activate sagittal schemas for thinking about time on the
fly, even though they recognize these schemas as culturally appropriate (Casasanto
& Jasmin, 2012; Walker & Cooperrider, 2016). In addition, the sagittal mapping
preference completely reversed between the subset of participants in Study 1
who did not have directional language prompts and the participants in Study 2
404 Heng Li

(χ2 = 15.53, p < .001 by Fisher’s exact test). To be specific, the production of spon-
taneous gestures on the sagittal axis was more likely to be congruent with future-
in-front mappings despite more past-in-front mappings found in spoken Chinese,
suggesting that there might be some dissociations between temporal language and
temporal thought.

General discussion

Across languages and cultures, people systematically use spatial expressions for
time concepts, and Mandarin speakers are no exception. Spoken Mandarin data
show that the metaphorical time orientation can extend along both a sagittal and
a vertical axis, evidenced in expressions like “qian-tian (front day) ‘the day be-
fore yesterday’” and “hou-tian (back day) ‘the day after tomorrow’”, where past
events are placed in front of the participant and future events behind. In the case
of vertical metaphors, the spatial concept of shang (“up”) and xia (“down”) are
frequently associated with temporal concepts including weeks, months, years,
and more, so it is common to refer to the prior month as the “shang-ge-yue (up
month)” and to the next month as the “xia-ge-yue (down month)”. Despite the
absence of left-right metaphors in speech, evidence from behavioral experiments
has shown that Chinese speakers have an implicit mental timeline that runs along
the lateral axis, with earlier times on the left and later times on the right. In one
experiment (Bergen & Lau, 2012), participants were asked to arrange sets of cards
depicting developmental stages of plants and animals (e.g., tadpole, froglet, frog).
Results showed that Mandarin speakers tended to represent time from left to right,
suggesting that reading and writing direction in Chinese culture modulates peo-
ple’s implicit timeline. It also should be noted that Chinese is traditionally written
vertically from top-to-bottom and then horizontally from right-to-left (de Sousa,
2012). However, under the influence of European scripts, the Mainland Chinese
government adopted the left-to-right direction since the 1950s, which is still the
dominant reading and writing direction in modern Chinese society. Given the kind
of space-mappings in spoken metaphors or the direction of reading and writing,
what is the gestural representation of time in Mandarin? Our results demonstrat-
ed that people also used sagittal (back-past, front-future/front-past, back-future),
vertical (up-past, down-future) and lateral (left-past, right-future) metaphors for
time both in deliberate (Study 1) and in spontaneous gestures (Study 2). However,
a close look revealed that the relationship between temporal gestures and spoken
space-time metaphors diverged in different contexts. For instance, participants
produced almost the same number of explicitly directed gestures in three spatial
directions, while they tended to produce more spontaneous gestures along the
 Time on hands 405

lateral axis, suggesting that Chinese speakers’ spontaneous temporal gestures are
motivated by pragmatic, kinematic, and mnemonic constraints.

Why temporal language and deliberate temporal gesture go hand in hand

In Study 1, the majority of sagittal, vertical and lateral gestures were congruent
with the predicted mapping for the axis on which they were produced. Overall,
the proportion of congruent gestures was significantly greater than that of incon-
gruent gestures, suggesting the effect of linguistic and the direction of reading
and writing on the conceptualization of time in directly elicited gestures. First,
the presence of directional language appears to have a huge effect on explicitly
elicited gestures. For instance, when participants were prompted using vertical
linguistic expressions, they tended to produce more gestures congruent with the
corresponding axis, with 32 congruent gestures on the vertical axis and 5 con-
gruent gestures on the lateral axis. Similarly, when they were prompted using an
expression that mentioned the sagittal axis, gestures on the sagittal axis were more
frequent, with 25 gestures on the sagittal axis and 5 gestures on the lateral axis.
How then can we explain the influence of linguistic expressions on speakers’
gesturing about time that we found in deliberate temporal gesture task? According
to the Interface Hypothesis (Kita & Özyürek, 2003), linguistic differences influ-
ence how spatio-motoric representations of referents are encoded in co-speech
gestures. This view is compatible with a more general account of how language
affects gesturing. McNeill (1992, 2005) proposes that gesture is a product of an on-
line “dialectic between imagery and language”. For instance, building on Talmy’s
(1985) two-way typological patterning of motion events, namely, that PATH and
MANNER information in satellite-framed languages (e.g., English) are encoded
within one clause and they are expressed in two clauses in verb-framed languages
(e.g., Turkish), Özyürek and Kita (1999) sought to investigate whether the gestural
representation of motion events is analogous to the cross-linguistic differences in
speech. As predicted, Özyürek and Kita (1999) found that while English speakers
were more likely to produce one gesture to encode the two components simultane-
ously, Turkish speakers were more likely to produce two gestures for PATH and
MANNER respectively. This pattern of results suggests that different verbalized
units for speaking yield different gestural forms. Our gestural data lend some addi-
tional support for this hypothesis, as we found reliable difference of the proportion
between congruent and incongruent gestures. In Study 1, the large proportion of
congruent gestures on the sagittal and vertical axis is possibly due to the fact that
spoken metaphors were more accessible in the production of deliberate gestures,
suggesting that Chinese speakers’ explicitly produced gesture were shaped by the
directional language in the prompts. This indicates that directional language may
406 Heng Li

encourage individuals to conceptualize time as flowing along the sagittal and ver-
tical axis, and thus has an online effect on the production of gestures.
However, when participants were prompted using linguistic expressions that
did not include direction words, they tended to produce more congruent gestures
on the lateral axis than the sagittal axis: by a ratio of about 2 to 1. The major-
ity of lateral gestures were congruent with the left-right mappings suggested by
graphic conventions for time in Chinese culture, indicating that people can also
construe time in terms of interaction with cultural artifacts. Similar to the calen-
dar in English culture, a typical Chinese calendar also assigns a date to each solar
day and depicts temporal linearity from left-to-right. In an innovative study, Duffy
(2014) investigated the role of cultural artifacts, namely calendars and clocks, in
the interpretation of ambiguous statements about time. In one experiment, Duffy
(2014, experiment 3) investigated the role of the analogue clock in the resolution
of the Noon meeting question (“Tomorrow’s noon meeting has been moved for-
ward by two hours. Draw the minute and the hour hands onto the face of the clock
to indicate the new time of the meeting”), by comparing responses elicited via a
clockwise clock with responses elicited via a counterclockwise clock. The results
showed that participants in the clockwise condition tended to provide a 2pm re-
sponse. By contrast, responses among participants in the counterclockwise condi-
tion were mixed, suggesting that the customary direction of motion of clock may
have caused some interference on a counterclockwise space-time mapping. In line
with earlier findings that cultural artifacts may influence people’s reasoning about
time, we also found that a large proportion of congruent lateral gestures further
justifies the role of the direction used in writing in shaping culturally specific as-
sociations between space and time in deliberate temporal gesture. The high rate of
congruity was found for lateral gesture prompted by deictic and sequential tem-
poral language, suggesting that the physical timelines in Chinese calendars may
encourage people to think about time flowing along the lateral axis, and to gesture
accordingly. Taken together, the majority of gestures congruent with sagittal, verti-
cal and lateral axis suggest that the strong association between space and time is
not only reflected in the language people use, but also in the cultural artifacts used
to represent time. The results provide further evidence that people automatically
and equally access and use spoken metaphors and culturally graphic-representa-
tion when reasoning about time.

Spontaneous gestures by Mandarin speakers

Lateral gestures
If spoken metaphors and cultural conventions can modulate deliberate manual
depictions of time as we’ve presented earlier, it follows that Mandarin speakers
 Time on hands 407

would use the three axes equally in their spontaneous gestures. Yet, the patterns
we observed in spontaneous gestures were complex and diverged from language
or/and culture-based expectations in many cases, which rules out this language-
or culture-specificity effect explanation. Prior to this study, much variation of the
metaphoric orientations of temporal gestures has been observed across languag-
es and cultures (Le Guen & Balam, 2012). Comparing gesture rates across axes,
Casasanto and Jasmine (2012) concluded that the left-to-right mental timeline ap-
pears to be dominant in English speakers’ spontaneous gestures. Yet, they noted
that “it remains an open question whether the pattern of sagittal vs. lateral gestures
that we observe in English speakers will generalize to speakers of other languag-
es that use left-to-right orthography, when evaluated using similar quantitative
methods” (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012, pp. 657–658). In Study 2, Mandarin tended
to produce more congruent lateral gestures than vertical and sagittal gestures;
thus, providing support for this hypothesis by showing that Mandarin speakers
also use lateral axis for their dominant timeline. Consider an example in which
a speaker says “ming-tian jiu-shi bu-yuan de jiang-lai (tomorrow is near future)”,
while gesturing rightward (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Example of rightward gesture for future from Study 2

Why do Mandarin speakers produce more congruent gestures on the lateral axis?
Some possible motivations including pragmatic, anatomic and mnemonic con-
straints have been suggested by previous research (e.g., Cienki, 1998; Casasanto
408 Heng Li

& Jasmin, 2012; Walker & Cooperrider, 2016). First, the gestural change on the
lateral axis is more perceivable, which is helpful for a conversational partner to
discriminate imaginary reference points on the mental timeline. Second, speaker’s
lateral movements can extend about twice as far on the lateral axis, allowing more
information to be conveyed for the same amount of physical motion. Third, space-
time mappings on the front-back call for an establishment of an ad hoc reference
point somewhere in front of the speaker’s body, which increases a mnemonic de-
mand for interlocutors. By contrast, on the lateral axis, the body can provide for a
permanent and visible reference point.

Vertical gestures
Literature on linguistic relativity typically assumes that Mandarin speakers think
about time in a categorically different way than English speakers because different
spoken metaphors are used in their languages (Fuhrman et al., 2010). Yet, contro-
versy arose when subsequent studies conducted in a range of settings did not rep-
licate the results of a vertical bias in metaphorical thinking of time by Mandarin
speakers (Chen, 2007; Chen & O’Seaghdha, 2013; January & Kako, 2007; Sanvido,
de Rose, & Chen, 2011; Tse & Altarriba, 2008). Recent lines of gestural research
have provided initial evidence that Mandarin speakers produced vertical gestures
when talking of time conceptions containing vertical metaphors, suggesting that
Mandarin speakers can think about time vertically (Gu et al., 2014). Yet, these
conclusions are subject to a skeptical interpretation. Gu et al.’s participants made
gestures about a wordlist containing spatial or temporal language. It is possible
that Chinese speakers’ congruent gestures on the vertical axis were shaped by the
directional language in the prompts. Although the same spatial representations of
time were found in participants when describing non-directional temporal lan-
guage (e.g., ape-man, caveman, modern man), it appeared to be a minor case.
Our findings in Study 2 showed that Mandarin speakers were less likely to
use the vertical axis than lateral axis overall. It might be argued, though, that the
vertical axis was less favorable than the lateral axis may simply be due to pragmatic
constraints. Chinese culture, among others, tends to associate the upper part of
space with good things and the lower part of the space with bad things (Meier &
Robinson, 2005). This pattern is revealed in linguistic expressions in Mandarin
like “shang-ceng (higher class)” and “xia-ceng (lower class)”, and in cultural con-
ventions requiring people to install an ancestral tablet in a high household altar.
For gesture, the thumbs-down sign is an indication of something bad or some-
thing that you disapprove of. Mandarin speakers produced fewer vertical gestures
possibly because downward gesture is a taboo and rarely seen in Chinese culture.
We do not believe this is the case for the following two reasons: First, if this space-
valence association imposes constraints on Mandarin speakers’ flexible use of axes
 Time on hands 409

in temporal gesture, it would be natural to assume that Mandarin speakers should

also produce fewer vertical gestures in Study 1. However, the results of Study 1
showed that Mandarin speakers produced almost the same number of gestures
on the three axes. Second, this vertical-valence association should not prevent
people from gesturing upwards for the past since upper part is linked with good-
ness. For example, a speaker says “guo-qu wo dou-shi zhu-zai xue-sheng su-she (I
always lived in the student dormitory in the past)”, while gesturing upward (see
Figure 3a). Later, the same speaker uses his right hand to gesture downward (see

Figure 3a. Upward gesture for past

Figure 3b. Downward gesture for future

410 Heng Li

Figure 3b) while saying “wei-lai wo-yao zi-ji mai fang-zi (I’ll buy my own house
in the future)”. However, the results showed that fewer congruent gestures on the
vertical axis were produced than on the lateral axis, suggesting that Mandarin
speakers did not show a vertical bias in their conception of time. By contrast, they
were more likely to think about time horizontally, appearing to run counter to
previous findings (Boroditsky, 2001).

Sagittal gesture
Our results also showed that most spontaneous gestures on the sagittal accord-
ing to the future-in-front/past-in-back mappings, suggesting Mandarin speakers
tended to conceptualize the future as in front of them. Regarding the metaphorical
orientation of time in Mandarin, there are three contrasting views on this issue as
summarized by Yu (2012, pp. 1335–1336): (a) the ego faces the past (Alverson,
1994); (b) the ego faces the future (Yu, 1998); and (c) the ego faces both the past
(the primary, preferred case) and the future (the minor case) (Ahrens & Huang,
2002). To date, the supporting evidence for these three views has primarily been
based on analyses of metaphors in speech. Despite more past-in-front mappings in
spoken metaphors, our findings that Mandarin speakers tended to gesture forward
for future and backward for past provide further evidence to reinforce the “future-
to-the-front” view that is realized by the conceptual metaphor “future is front/
past is behind” (Yu, 1998, 2012). For example, a speaker says “yi-qian jiu-shi guo-
qu de shi-jian (the past refers to the time period which has passed)” while moving
her right hand simultaneously backward (see Figure 4). The temporal word “yi-
qian” referring to past is derived from the head words of locality, qian ‘front’, while
its antonym word “yi hou” referring to future is derived from hou ‘back’, indicating
that front-to-the-past orientation is adopted for spoken words. However, the tem-
poral gesture examined here is produced according to back-to-the-past mapping,
suggesting some striking dissociation between temporal language and temporal
thinking. Recent lines of research on temporal gesture have also noted this dis-
sociation (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012; Casasanto, 2016). According to “Temporal
Focus Hypothesis” (de la Fuente et al., 2014), a possible motivation for the dis-
sociation between space-time mappings is people’s cultural attitudes toward time.
Moroccan Arabic speakers, who place more value on tradition, are thus more past-
focused and tend to conceptualize the past as ahead of and the future as behind
them despite using future-in-front metaphors in speech. If it is right, then the
Mandarin speakers should attribute more importance to the future. To our knowl-
edge, this prediction has not been attested in the literature.
 Time on hands 411

Figure 4. Example of backward gesture for past from Study 2

Conclusion

Gesture is a useful window to reveal the implicit mental representations of time

(Cooperrider & Núñez, 2009; Sullivan & Bui, 2016). Evidence from deliberate ges-
tures supports the view that spoken metaphors and cultural conventions influence
Mandarin speakers’ deliberate gestures because the former can serve as useful
cues for guiding their temporal thought. Yet, in spontaneous gestures, Mandarin
speakers tend to gesture congruently with the lateral axis in reasoning about time,
suggesting that although Mandarin speakers could think about time vertically,
they still showed a horizontal bias when talking about deictic time. To reiterate
Casasanto and Jasmin (2012), a greater understanding of spatial metaphors for
time not only involves knowledge attainment in linguistics, but also in cognitive
science and other related disciplines. Together, we presented evidence combined
with previous findings showing that gesture can provide novel observation of the
spatial conceptualization of time.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Adam Kendon and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments
and suggestions. This paper has benefited from discussions with Sarah Duffy, Sherman Wilcox,
and Alan Cienki. However, any shortcomings of the present article are mine alone.
412 Heng Li

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Appendix

Deictic reference, directional language：

你怎么用手势表达很久以后发生的事情？ long time from now, back in the future (lit.)
你怎么用手势表达很久以前发生的事情？ a long time ago, ahead in the past (lit.)
你怎么用手势表达下个月将要发生的事情？ up (last) month.
你怎么用手势表达上个月已经发生的事情？ down (next) month.
Deictic reference, non-directional language:
你怎么用手势表达将要发生的事情？ in the future.
你怎么用手势表达已经发生的事情？ in the past.
Sequential reference, directional language:
你怎么用手势表达2010年已经发生的事情，以 in 2010, and before that.
及2010年之前发生的事情？
 Time on hands 415

你怎么用手势表达2020年将要发生的事情，以 in 2020, and after that.

及2020年之后发生的事情？
你怎么用手势表达将要发生在你孩子那一代人 in your children’s generation, and then a down(next)
身上的事情以及他们下一代将要发生的事情？ generation after that.
你怎么用手势表达已经发生在你父母那一代人 in your parents’ generation, and then an up(last)
身上的事情以及他们上一代已经发生的事情？ generation after that.
Sequential reference, non-directional language:
你怎么用手势表达2010年已经发生的事情，以 in 2010, and earlier than that
及比2010年更早时候发生的事情？
你怎么用手势表达2020年将要发生的事情，以 in 2020, and later than that
及比2020年更晚时候发生的事情？

Author’s address
Heng Li
School of Linguistic Sciences and Arts
Jiangsu Normal University
Heping Road, Yunlong district
Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province
China
leehem168@163.com

Biographical notes
Heng Li is a PhD student of the Northumbria University and a research staff member of Deaf
Language and Cognition lab of Jiangsu Normal University. He has carried out extensive field-
work in China working on gesture, Chinese Sign Language, and bimodal bilingualism.