The production line as a context for low metaphoricity: Exploring links between gestures, iconicity, and artefacts on a factory shop floor

This paper investigates metaphor use in a heavily industrialized context. Using video recordings collected at a salmon factory in France as data, I study metaphor in the gestures that workers perform in technical specialist communication along a noisy production line. Within a framework for describing gesture forms and identifying their underlying conceptual motivations, I analyse the iconicity of the gestures and argue that this stretch of the production line was a context for low metaphoricity. My analyses show that gesture iconicity was motivated by metonymic mappings within concrete source domains but not metaphoric mappings to abstract target domains. This finding emphasises that metaphor activation can depend on aspects of context, including the communicative environment and the artefacts it contains.