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

One of the introduced 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 has in co-speech gestures and under the influence of which one of the metaphorical sources of space. For this purpose, six possible metaphorical sources adapted from space on three axes of sagittal, lateral, and vertical in six spatial directions were tested 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 from back to front adopted from the metaphorical-spatial source from linguistic metaphors with 55.75%; and the right-left horizontal-lateral axis adopted from the metaphorical-spatial source from 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 artifacts in writing or linguistic metaphors.