Volume 23, Issue 4

Do English speakers think about time the way they talk about it? In spoken English, time appears to flow along the sagittal axis (front/back): the future is ahead and the past is behind us. Here we show that when asked to gesture about past and future events deliberately, English speakers often use the sagittal axis, as language suggests they should. By contrast, when producing co-speech gestures spontaneously, they use the lateral axis (left/right) overwhelmingly more often, gesturing leftward for earlier times and rightward for later times. This left-right mapping of time is consistent with the flow of time on calendars and graphs in English-speaking cultures, but is completely absent from conventional spoken metaphors. English speakers gesture on the lateral axis even when they are using front/back metaphors in their co-occurring speech. This speech-gesture dissociation is not due to any lack of lexical or constructional resources to spatialize time laterally in language, nor to any lack of physical resources to spatialize time sagittally in gesture. We propose that when speakers are describing sequences of events, they often use neither the Moving Ego nor Moving Time perspectives. Rather, they adopt a “Moving Attention” perspective, which is grounded in patterns of interaction with cultural artifacts, not in patterns of interaction with the natural environment. We suggest possible pragmatic, kinematic, and mnemonic motivations for the use of a lateral mental timeline in gesture and in thought. Gestures reveal an implicit spatial conceptualization of time that cannot be inferred from language.

This study examines whether the sentence structure of particular languages predisposes speakers to particular attentional patterns. We hypothesized that the holistic attentional bias of Japanese participants observed in a previous study (Masuda and Nisbett 2001), attributed in that paper to pan-Asian cultural factors, is better interpreted as a consequence of specific linguistic properties of Japanese: namely, sentence structure. In experiments involving Japanese, English and Chinese native speakers, it was found that Japanese participants reported more Ground information before mentioning Figure information, mentioned more background details overall, and remembered background elements in a subsequent recall task significantly more accurately than either English or Chinese participants. The “Asian response” was thus split, as predicted by the grammatical typology of Japanese and Chinese. Our results therefore support a linguistic interpretation of Japanese-English differences, and run counter to the previous explanation in terms of culture.

In languages with variable subject expression, or “pro-drop” languages, when do speakers use subject pronouns? We address this question by investigating the linguistic conditioning of Spanish first-person singular pronoun yo in conversational data, testing hypotheses about speakers' choice of an expressed subject as factors in multivariate analysis. Our results indicate that, despite a widely held understanding of a contrastive role for subject pronouns, yo expression is primarily driven by cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors. In cognitive terms, we find that yo is favored in the presence of human subjects intervening between coreferential 1sg subjects (a refined measure of the well-described phenomenon of “switch-reference”). A mechanical effect is observed in two distinct manifestations of priming: the increased rate of yo when the previous coreferential first singular subject was realized as yo and when the subject of the immediately preceding clause was realized pronominally. And evidence for a particular yo  +  cognitive verb construction is provided by a speaker-turn effect, the favoring of yo in a turn-initial Intonation Unit, that is observed with cognitive (but not other) verbs, which form a category centered around high frequency yo creo ‘I think’.

This paper introduces a new, concept-based method for measuring variation in the use and success of loanwords by presenting the results of a case-study on 149 English person reference nouns (i.e. common nouns used to designate people, such as manager ) in Dutch. With this paper, we introduce four methodological improvements to current quantitative corpus-based anglicism research, based on the general tenets of Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Geeraerts 2005; Kristiansen and Geeraerts 2007; Geeraerts 2010; Geeraerts et al. 2010): (1) replacing raw frequency as a success measure by a concept-based onomasiological approach; (2) relying on larger datasets and semi-automatic extraction techniques; (3) adding a multivariate perspective to the predominantly structuralist orientation of current accounts; (4) using inferential statistical techniques to help explain variation. We illustrate our method by presenting a case-study on variation in the success of English person reference nouns in Dutch. Generally, this article aims to show how a Cognitive Sociolinguistic perspective on loanword research is beneficial for both paradigms. On the one hand, the concept-based approach provides new insights in the spread of loanwords. On the other hand, attention to contact linguistic phenomena offers a new expansion to the domain of cognitive linguistic studies taking a variationist approach.