Will, I. (2022). Conceptualization of Time through Hand Gestures in Hausa… 339 CONCEPTUALIZATION OF TIME THROUGH HAND GESTURES IN HAUSA CULTURAL SETTINGS Izabela Will University of Warsaw, Poland 1. Introduction Time is commonly conceptualized in terms of space as evidenced in expressions in English: the winter is approaching or Hausa: damina ta wuce ‘the rainy season has passed’. Such expressions have been analyzed across languages in terms of conceptual metaphors and mappings between source domain – space and target domain – time (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Lakoff & Johnson 1999). There are cross-linguistic differences in the spatial conceptualization of time. The front-back orientation distinguishes the past/earlier time and the future/later time in English. Therefore, the past is conceptualized as back, e.g. you don’t get these years back while future is referred to as the point/space situated in front, e.g. more lines are planned for the years ahead. However, some languages like Mandarin Chinese also employ a culture-specific up- down orientation in the use of the lexical shàng ‘up’ and xià ‘down’ (Chui 2018: 177), where EARLIER TIME IS UP and LATER TIME IS DOWN. Evidence that spatial concepts largely constitute our conceptions of temporality comes not only from language, but also from other modalities such as gestures (Evans 2005: 15). Gestural data provide crucial information unavailable to purely linguistic analysis, suggesting that, when investigating conceptual systems, both forms of expression should be analyzed complementarily (Núñez & Sweetser 2006: 1). Co-speech gestures reveal the real-time metaphorical conceptualization in the context of use (Chui 2018:177). For example, English speakers point backward while uttering the phrase long ago (Núñez and Cooperrider 2013). Aymara and Vietnamese speakers point to the front when talking about past time (Núñez & Sweetser 2006; Sullivan & Bui 2016), whereas Chinese speakers point upward (Chui 2011; Bergen & Lau 2012; Gu et al. 2017). Pointing upward in Yucatec Maya can refer to the past and down to the future (Guen et al. 2012). Sometimes there are linguistic-gestural divergence in spatial conceptualization of time; i.e. speech and gesture present different pictures of the same event. Frontward timeline is used in speech (i.e. earlier is front) and