In this theoretical paper we propose three different kinds of cognitive structure that have not been differentiated in the psychological and cognitive linguistic literatures. They are spatial primitives, image schemas, and schematic integrations. Spatial primitives are the first conceptual building blocks formed in infancy, image schemas are simple spatial stories built from them, and schematic integrations use the first two types to build concepts that include non-spatial elements, such as force and emotion. These different kinds of structure have all come under the umbrella term of ‘image schemas’. However, they differ in their content, developmental origin, imageability, and role in meaning construction in language and in thought. The present paper indicates how preverbal conceptualization needs to be taken into account for a complete understanding of image schemas and their uses. It provides examples to illustrate this influence, the most important of these being the primacy of imageable spatial information.

When and how were the arrows of love created? Individual invention has been argued for by classicists; a connection to everyday metaphors has been suggested in cognitive linguistics. I propose new cognitive-theoretical tools: the Abstract Cause Personification blend and an EMISSION image-schema. I explain the emergence of Love the Archer in Antiquity through conceptual integration from earlier materials: Apollo the Archer personifying death, erotic emissions in lyric imagery, the link between passion and extreme illness, and possibly the arrows of glance. The embodied, human-scale story of causation that structures the arrows of love has been crucial for their success.

The development of large-scale corpora has led to a quantum leap in our understanding of speech in recent years. By contrast, the analysis of massive datasets has so far had a limited impact on the study of gesture and other visual communicative behaviors. We utilized the UCLA-Red Hen Lab multi-billion-word repository of video recordings, all of them showing communicative behavior that was not elicited in a lab, to quantify speech-gesture co-occurrence frequency for a subset of linguistic expressions in American English. First, we objectively establish a systematic relationship in the high degree of co-occurrence between gesture and speech in our subset of expressions, which consists of temporal phrases. Second, we show that there is a systematic alignment between the informativity of co-speech gestures and that of the verbal expressions with which they co-occur. By exposing deep, systematic relations between the modalities of gesture and speech, our results pave the way for the data-driven integration of multimodal behavior into our understanding of human communication.

Metaphor and simile research has traditionally focused on the projection of content from vehicle to topic, thereby revealing new meaning in the topic. We show that the meaning of vehicles also changes during figurative language understanding. Participants read a poem that likens the temporal self to a snake being divided by a machete, and were asked to draw the snake. Against prototypical snake drawings, their snakes showed central characteristics of timelines: they were straight and oriented towards the right. These results suggest that figurative language understanding, and possibly all language understanding, is an integrative and creative process of the kind proposed by Blending Theory. The results also suggest that entrenched, conventional patterns for mapping and integrating conceptual structures, such as the timeline, can play a central role in the meaning of highly creative figurative language

There is little doubt that spatial information underlies a great deal of our processing of temporal information. Research on the ways in which timelines are associated with specific grammatical constructions has just started, and has brought forward new challenges for construction grammar. A true multimodal construction grammar cannot be developed using the same tools and mechanisms applied so far, but will require instead a fresh approach and a careful rethinking of the whole communicative process. It is our belief than in this transition from a narrow conception of linguistic communication to a broader and more complete view of communication “in the wild”, multimodal construction grammar will play an important role.