Express: what makes a novel spatial metaphor of time: a study of hand gestures

Abstract

How people process nonliteral language has long been studied in the context of metaphorical expressions. Conventional metaphors seem to be processed differently than novel metaphors. In this study, we first created novel spatial metaphors of time in Turkish and standardized them for aptness, conventionality, metaphoricity, ease of interpretation, imageability, and number of possible interpretations. Then, we asked participants to explain these metaphors to an experimenter and rate them on the standardized dimensions after the explanation task. We coded participants’ gestures for frequency and relation to temporal concepts. The results showed that our participants rated novel metaphors higher on metaphoricity and number of possible interpretations (which signal complexity) and lower on the other meaning criteria that signal simplicity, compared to the conventional metaphors. They produced more total or temporal gestures for novel metaphors depending on the condition. These results suggest that creating novel spatial metaphors of time was possible, and that they were different than conventional metaphors on various meaning dimensions. Moreover, conventionality could be a factor related to the processing demands of metaphors. These demands elicit gestures from people to process spatial metaphors of time as they use spatial information to make sense of time.