EURIAS fellowship at NIAS

Here is a summary of the project. More information at the CREATIME website.

THE SPATIAL COGNITION OF TIME: CREATIVITY, CULTURE, COMMUNICATION

CREATIME proposes a new model for the spatial cognition of time and, more generally, for creativity in meaning construction. Humans build complex meanings, such as time, through conceptual mapping, by reusing what we find easier to organize: percepts, basic events, or cultural habits. Transfer from a source (mainly sensorimotor, e.g. space, force) to a target (less structured, e.g. time, emotion) has long been the predominant paradigm in this research tradition. The spatialization of time, well attested across languages as well as in non-verbal meaning construction, has become a classical case study in conceptual mappings.

However, the transfer model has proved insufficient to account for emergent meanings (not derived from source or target) or for ad-hoc effects, which cannot be explained by entrenched mappings alone. CREATIME proposes a paradigm shift from direct transfer (■→○) to blending (■→◘←○), replacing fixed A-to-B projections with more flexible templates for the formation of ad-hoc conceptual wholes.

Cognitive linguistic research still relies heavily on decontextualized examples, qualitative analyses, or psycholinguistic evidence. To fully understand how these templates are exploited creatively, we need big data about what people are actually doing “in the wild.” Also, if we hypothesize that time-space mappings constitute a network of projections that produces a blended simulation, the resulting mental imagery should show up across modalities (language and gesture), and its more relevant parameters (directionality, orientation, manner of motion, speed) will be meaningfully manipulated for diverse communicative effects beyond the representation of temporality.

CREATIME seeks to expose the full complexity and flexibility of time-space mappings, and to analyze how affective, aesthetic, and pragmatic effects result from their manipulation. For this, I compare hundreds of temporal expressions from everyday oral communication (with immediate goals in real-time performance) and verbal art mediated by writing (with delayed conceptualization seeking more complex effects). The 2017-2018 project at NIAS will profit from large-scale empirical studies, for which I am coordinating two teams, funded by national and regional grants in Spain.

The multimodality team is integrated within the Red Hen Lab, an international consortium for research on multimodal communication. We are developing the NewsScape database of Television News, curated by the Library of the University of California Los Angeles. NewsScape contains over 300,000 hours of recorded TV news in English, Spanish, and other languages (with about 150 hours being captured daily in nodes around the world), alongside over 3 billion words of time-stamped close captioning, synchronized with the video. These subtitles can be searched like a textual corpus, allowing us to view a clip with the moment in which the linguistic expression searched was uttered. We search for temporal expressions, filter out the instances with observable gesture, and build a database with hundreds of instances annotated by the most relevant parameters (axis, directionality, role of hands or head, relative positions of interlocutors or camera, etc.), comparing English and Spanish.

The poetics project searches NewsScape for morphosyntactic and lexical patterns that reveal relevant figurative language about time. In parallel, we search PoetiCog, an electronic corpus that we have built, with hundreds of poetic works in English, Spanish, and modern Greek, with ancient Greek, Latin, and other literatures forthcoming. We annotate major linguistic and discursive aspects, and compare the mental imagery as shown by the verbal and gestural patterns.

The main goals of the NIAS stay are to discuss the implications of this research across disciplines, to prepare a monograph and other publications providing a theoretical analysis and an overview of the data, and to work towards making the data and metadata of the project as widely available as possible to the academic community.