Gestural Representation of Vertical Metaphor of Moral Concept in Chinese

While people use not only speech but also gesture to express moral metaphors, little attention has been paid to the study on moral metaphor and gesture. This study thus examines gestural representation of Chinese moral metaphor on a vertical dimension. It is found that gestures with upward pointing, palm-up orientation, upper space and upward movement are relatively more likely to accompany moral concepts, whereas gestures with downward pointing, palm-down orientation, lower space and downward movement are relatively more likely to accompany immoral concepts. These results indicate that Chinese speakers tend to map moral and immoral concepts onto “UP” and “DOWN” in space respectively, which therefore provides some evidence for the conceptual reality of the Chinese moral metaphor on a vertical dimension, namely “MORAL IS UP & IMMRORAL IS DOWN”. In addition, the present study finds that gesture can indicate the source domain of moral metaphor either present or absent in the speech, which thus suggest that both gesture and speech are important ways to represent the moral concept and that the two modalities may come under the same cognitive system. All these above indicate that studies on conceptual moral metaphor should broaden the scope of study by incorporating the gestural modality in order to investigate the metaphorical moral thinking more comprehensively.