Metaphor in Gesture in an Organizational Context

Abstract

Abstract This chapter draws on conceptual metaphor theory as a framework for viewing metaphor, and focuses on willful movements of the hands and forearms as an object of research. Metaphor in gesture is considered as the expression of some target domain (a topic in the concurrent speech or context) in terms of the source domain represented by the imagery produced in gesture. Consideration is given to how metaphor in gesture has been studied to date in organizational contexts. A set of guidelines for metaphor identification in gesture—the so-called MIG-G (Cienki 2017)—is presented in summary form; this could be employed in the analysis of video data of discourse from organizational contexts in order to provide a multimodal perspective to one’s research. The value of doing so is that it can help reveal speakers’ ways of conceptualizing, framing, and presenting ideas which do not always receive explicit verbal expression.