Time

CREATIME: Time in the creative mind

TIME constitutes a paradigmatic case of an abstract domain that needs to be conceptualized in terms of more structured experiences. For example, we talk about time in terms of spatial motion (Monday is approaching), or the manipulation of amounts or objects (give me a minute).

I am interested in how temporal meanings emerge from the interplay of conceptual templates and instance-based creativity. I study this phenomenon across different modalities (language, gesture, graphics...) and types of discourse (literary texts, TV News, Press articles...). I am particularly interested in how this process relates to our cognitive capacities for imagination and reasoning, mainly for conceptual integration, schema formation, and conceptual framing. So far, I have focused on the mental timeline and on the materialization of time.

My research on time combines corpus research, linguistic analysis, and experiments. With collaborators from the Red Hen Lab, I am building the largest database of co-speech gesture associated to temporal expressions. I am also building a repository of figurative language from a variety of literary traditions, which will allow us to study recurrent patterns in the way spatial relations and other concepts are used for aesthetic and emotional effects in temporal meanings.

See related publications.

Excelencia Grant for Fundamental Research, Spanish Ministry of Economy (ref. FFI2015-70876-P): Multimodal Patterns for the Representation of Time (TimeGest). Co-PI: Inés Olza.

EURIAS Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

CREATIME: Time in the creative mind