Time in Chinese hands: Gesture and sign

This chapter examines how Chinese people (Mandarin monolinguals; Mandarin-English bilinguals; deaf Chinese Sign Language (CSL) signers; Mandarin learners of CSL) use gestures and signs to creatively represent time. All groups spatialize time on the lateral, vertical, and sagittal axes, but differ in their choices of axes and directions of movements. For instance, Mandarin-English bilinguals produce more vertical time gestures in Mandarin than in English. Mandarin speakers can produce past-in-front and past-at-back gestures, whereas CSL deaf signers only exploit past-at-back signs. Mandarin learners of CSL perform more past-at-back gestures than Mandarin-speaking non-signers. In short, cultural, linguistic, and bodily experiences can jointly shape how Chinese people express time creatively in different modalities.