In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses, on the assumption that by interrogating creativity, new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity, which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume, endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema, music, graphic novels, etc.), but also its more ‘mundane’, everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use, political discourse, or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal, pictorial, auditory, and gestural), the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.
Author(s): Anna Piata, Adriana Gordejuela, Daniel Alcaraz Carrin
Series: Human Cognitive Processing, 75
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 253
City: Amsterdam
Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity
Editorial page
Title page
Copyright page
Table of contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Setting the scene: The concept of time
2. From time to creativity (and back)
3. The organization of the volume
References
Part I. Time and creativity in language
Chapter 1. A corpus-based look at time metaphors
1. Introduction
1.1 A first caveat: On the problems of deciding what a motion verb is
2. Study: Time-measurement units and motion verbs
2.1 Material and methods
3. Results and discussion
3.1 Path verbs and their temporal meanings
3.2 Manner verbs and their temporal meanings
3. A test of true creativity: The Week examples
4. Conclusion
Funding
References
Appendix 1. List of motion verbs
1. Translational motion
2. Static motion
Chapter 2. Time moves more often in poetry: A comparative corpus study
1. Introduction
2. An indicator of cognitive differences in time spatialization
3. Measuring the frequency of time-unit-as-motion-verb-subject
4. Results
5. Discussion
6. Conclusion
References
Appendix 1. List of motion verbs
Appendix 2. Authors included in the PoetiCog database
Appendix 3. Statistics
Chapter 3. What is time?: Verbal creativity in copula constructions
1. Introduction
2. Copula constructions: From everyday speech to poetic discourse
3. The data
4. What is time?: Evidence from poetry
5. Discussion and conclusions
References
Chapter 4. Working on it: The creation of chronological time in political discourse and the democratic meaning of elections
1. Introduction
2. Chrono-work: A theoretical framework
3. Is chronology democratic?: Chrono-work and the democratic meaning of elections
4. Background and methodology
5. Findings
5.1 The 1949 Israeli election
5.2 The 1988 Israeli election
6. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References
Part II. Beyond language: Multimodal representations of time
Chapter 5. Creative visual metaphors of protracted and frozen time in autobiographical comics about depression
1. Introduction
2. The painful experience of “explicit” time in depression
3. Spatial dimensions of time in human understanding and representation
4. Representations of subjective time in comics
5. Creative time metaphors in graphic memoirs
5.1 Pictorial metaphors for entrapment in spacetime
5.2 Spatial metaphors for entrapment in spacetime
6. Conclusion
References
Chapter 6. Time-creation in film: An embodied cognitive perspective
1. Introduction
2. Spatio-temporal reasoning
3. Creating spatio-temporal clarity in cinema
3.1 Creativity within spatio-temporal template I
3.2 Creativity within spatio-temporal template II
3.3 Creativity within spatio-temporal template III
4. Creating spatio-temporal ambiguity in cinema
4.1 Accident (1967)
4.2 Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
4.3 I am Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
5. Conclusion
References
Chapter 7. Beyond the limits: Merging past and present in film flashbacks
1. Introduction
2. Flashbacks in film: Tradition and innovation
3. Creative techniques in film flashbacks
3.1 Embedding the past in the present
3.2 Decompression of identity for viewpoint compression
4. Conclusions
References
Films
Chapter 8. From “slow lettuce” to “striated time”: On Pierre Boulez’s conceptualizations of musical temporality
1. Introduction
2. Preliminary approaches
2.1 Musical time and time in musical composition
2.2 Eating kale and expressing musical experience
3. Boulez on time
3.1 Smoothness vs striae
3.2 Straightness vs curvature
3.3 Blocks vs bubbles
4. Expressing temporal ideas beyond language
4.1 Engraving time: Boulez’s musical notation
4.2 Enacting time: Boulez conducting
5. A provisional model
Funding
References
Chapter 9. Physical and imaginary landmarks in English time gestures
1. Introduction
1.1 What is a gesture?
1.2 Time gestures
2. Creativity in (temporal) gestures
2.1 Creation and manipulation of imaginary timelines
2.2 Inclusion of physical items
2.3 Facial expression and time gestures
3. Conclusion
References
Chapter 10. Time in Chinese hands: Gesture and sign
1. Introduction
2. Mandarin space-time metaphors
3. Time in Chinese gestures
3.1 Temporal gestures in Mandarin monolinguals
3.2 Do Mandarin-English bilingual speakers gesture about time differently in Mandarin and English?
4. Time in Chinese Sign Language
4.1 Temporal expressions in CSL
4.2 Does bodily experience of CSL influence Mandarin speakers’ co-speech temporal gestures?
5. What shapes the creation of time in Chinese hands?
5.1 The creativity of vertical space-time mappings
5.2 The creativity of asymmetric space-time mappings in CSL
6. Summary and conclusions
References
Epilogue. Creative to whom, and on what basis?: The role of perspective
1. Introduction
2. Three perspectives
2.1 The scope of relevant behaviors
3. These perspectives in context
3.1 Face-to-face interaction
3.2 Mediated interaction
4. Perspectives from frame knowledge
5. Closing points
References
Index
