Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier

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Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier

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Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier

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Universidad de Murcia. Departamento de Filología Inglesa

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Gesturing in the wild: evidence for a flexible mental timeline
(John Benjamins Publishing, 2020-12) Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Pagán Cánovas, Cristóbal; Olza, Inés; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
Psycholinguistic evidence shows that spatial domains are automatically activated when processing temporal expressions. Speakers conceptualize time as a straight line deployed along different axes (mostly sagittal, though also vertical). The use of the lateral axis, which cannot be lexicalized in any language, has nonetheless been attested in temporal tasks in laboratories using a variety of experiments. This leads to the question of what axes are actually at work when conceptualizating time in oral communication. The present study examines a great number of temporal expressions, taken from television shows, noting their associated co-speech gestures. Our results show that (1) speakers overwhelmingly use the lateral axis; (2) they are not performing simple space-to-time mappings, but are using instead a “timeline”, a material anchor which is a far more complex construct and that can explain some of the intricacies and contextual variations shown in the pattern of results.
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Enaction through co-speech gesture: the rhetorical handing of the mental timeline
(De Gruyter Brill, 2020-12-04) Pagán Cánovas, Cristóbal; Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
This chapter will explore the embodied, enacted and embedded nature of co-speech gestures in the meaning-making process of time conceptualization. We will review three different contextualized communicative exchanges extracted from American Television interviews. First, we will offer a step-by-step form description of the different gesture realizations performed by the speakers as well as a brief description of the gaze fixation patterns. After that, we will offer a functional analysis which will interpret the gesturing patters in terms of their communicative goals on their respective communicative contexts as well as the complex interplay between verbal and non-verbal communication. The resulting interaction between speech, gesture and other bodily movements give rise to a dynamic system that allows for the construction of highly complex meanings: time co-speech gestures play a crucial role in the simulation of virtual anchors for complex mental networks that integrate conceptual and perceptual information.
Open Access
Quantifying the speech-gesture relation with massive multimodal datasets: informativity in time expressions
(Public Library of Science, 2020-06-02) Pagán Cánovas, Cristóbal; Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Olza, Inés; Ramscar, Michael; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
The development of large-scale corpora has led to a quantum leap in our understanding of speech in recent years. By contrast, the analysis of massive datasets has so far had a limited impact on the study of gesture and other visual communicative behaviors. We utilized the UCLA-Red Hen Lab multi-billion-word repository of video recordings, all of them showing communicative behavior that was not elicited in a lab, to quantify speech-gesture co-occurrence frequency for a subset of linguistic expressions in American English. First, we objectively establish a systematic relationship in the high degree of co-occurrence between gesture and speech in our subset of expressions, which consists of temporal phrases. Second, we show that there is a systematic alignment between the informativity of co-speech gestures and that of the verbal expressions with which they co-occur. By exposing deep, systematic relations between the modalities of gesture and speech, our results pave the way for the data-driven integration of multimodal behavior into our understanding of human communication.
Open Access
Temporal expressions in English and Spanish: influence of typology and metaphorical construal
(Frontiers Media, 2020-10-16) Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
This study investigates how typological and metaphorical construal differences may affect the use and frequency of temporal expressions in English and Spanish. More precisely, we explore whether there are any differences between English, a satellite-framed language, and Spanish, a verb-framed language, in the use of certain temporal linguistic expressions that include a spatial, deictic component (Deictic Time), a purely temporal relation between two events (Sequential Time) or the expression of the duration of an event (Duration). To achieve this, we perform two different types of studies. First, we conduct an informational gain or loss analysis of 1,650 of English-to-Spanish translations extracted from parallel corpora. Secondly, we compare the frequency of 33 English and 27 Spanish temporal expressions in two similar written online corpora (EnTenTen and EsTenTen, respectively) and a television news spoken corpus (NewsScape). Our results suggest that English uses “deictic expressions with directional language” (explicitly stating the spatial location of the temporal event, e.g., back in those days/in the future ahead) much more frequently than Spanish, to the extent that such directional information is often excluded in English-to-Spanish translations. Also, sequential expressions (such as before that/later than) and duration expressions (during the whole day) are much more frequent in Spanish. These usage differences, explained by the variability in motion typology and metaphoric construal, open up the interesting question of how these differences in linguistic usage could affect the conceptualization of time of English and Spanish speakers.
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Duration as length Vs amount in English and Spanish: a corpus study
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-04-12) Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
Previous psycholinguistic studies have suggested that English and Spanish express temporal duration through different metaphors. English tends to use the time-as-length metaphor (e.g. I have been waiting for a long time), while Spanish prefers the time-as-quantity metaphor (e.g. he esperado mucho tiempo; ‘I have waited much time’). However, these results conflated two different construals: the temporal duration construal, which can use length or quantity metaphors, (e.g. long time, that didn’t last much time) and the time-as-a-resource construal, which mostly employs quantity metaphors (e.g. you spent too much time). This study confirms through corpus linguistic data that English favors the time-as-length metaphor when expressing temporal duration, while it favors the time-as-quantity metaphor when expressing the time-as-a-resource construal. On the other hand, Spanish employs the time-as-quantity metaphor both in the duration and the resource construal. In addition, English shows a higher frequency of time-as-resource expressions, while Spanish shows a higher frequency of duration metaphors. This difference might be explained by the fact that English has been classified as a monochronic culture, conceptualizing time as a valuable object, while Spanish is a polychronic culture, categorizing time in a more abstract and flexible way.
Open Access
Distant time, distant gesture: speech and gesture correlate to express temporal distance
(De Gruyter Brill, 2021-06-14) Valenzuela Manzanares, Javier; Alcaraz Carrión, Daniel; Filología Inglesa; Facultades de la UMU::Facultad de Letras
This study investigates whether there is a relation between the semantics of linguistic expressions that indicate temporal distance and the spatial properties of their co-speech gestures. To this date, research on time gestures has focused on features such as gesture axis, direction, and shape. Here we focus on a gesture property that has been overlooked so far: the distance of the gesture in relation to the body. To achieve this, we investigate two types of temporal linguistic expressions are addressed: proximal (e.g., near future, near past) and distal (e.g., distant past, distant future). Data was obtained through the NewsScape library, a multimodal corpus of television news. A total of 121 co-speech gestures were collected and divided into the two categories. The gestures were later annotated in terms of gesture space and classified in three categories: (i) center, (ii) periphery, and (iii) extreme periphery. Our results suggest that gesture and language are coherent in the expression of temporal distance: when speakers locate an event far from them, they tend to gesture further from their body; similarly, when locating an event close to them, they gesture closer to their body. These results thus reveal how co-speech gestures also reflect a space-time mapping in the dimension of distance.