English temporal gestures are spatial gestures

There is great deal of evidence, both linguistic and psycholinguistic, that time is structured with the help of space. This relationship has also been found in gesture studies: the gestures produced when uttering temporal expressions exhibit very clear and structured spatial properties. The question that remains, though, is whether these co-speech spatial gestures accompanying temporal expressions are the same as the spatial gestures produced with spatial expressions. Do we produce spatial gestures more frequently when uttering purely spatial expressions than when we are using temporal expressions? Are the characteristics of those spatial gestures equivalent in terms of parameters such as axis or directionality? What do these similarities or differences tell us about the use of space in time? The present study examines one grammatical construction (From X to Y) which can be used both for space and for time, and examines the gestural patterns associated with each of these different senses, noting their similarities and differences. Our results show that the gestures produced while uttering spatial expressions share the same characteristics with those carried out while uttering temporal expressions: (1) the frequency of gesturing is quite similar, pointing at a similar informational need, for both the spatial/concrete and the temporal/metaphorical cases; (2) the axes used are basically the same (with a higher indexically-based use of verticality in the case of spatial gestures), and (3) the directionality of the gestures is also shared, again eschewing the concrete-metaphorical distinction. These results are especially interesting, since they are also compatible with the hypothesis put forward by Cai & Connell (2015), hinting at a common representational format of both domains. At any case, this study reinforces the solid relationship between the domains of space and of time, proving once again how gesturing can be an invaluable tool in finding out about conceptualization patterns.