“Labor” as a specific domain of embodied experience and a source of imagery and figurative language in early China remains understudied. The study invites critical attention to this topic, focusing on four types of imagery of labor—plowing, weaving, fishing, and hunting—which constituted an interpenetrated rhetorical body sustaining varying socio-political and intellectual agendas. Either foregrounded with expressive rhetorical figures like metaphor and allegory or sedimented in commonplace language, the four types of labor imagery emerged and proliferated to present a constellation of moral, epistemic, and aesthetic values toward the characterization of specific practices of ruling, learning, speaking, and writing, as well as the intellectual agency thereof. This rhetorical phenomenon emerged in pre-imperial China and gained new prominence during Han times. Especially since the first century bce, the four tropes of labor were made particularly useful to characterize a growing body of intellectual labor, which was increasingly engaged and coupled with literary learning and production in a manner of self-oriented accumulation and manifestation. This change worked in concert with a forcefully emerging and proliferating literary culture, as well as its embedded scholarly aesthetics and ideology.

This article posits that team sports can provide fresh insights into the place of leisure pursuits in the lives, networks and outlooks of historical literary figures. The social and literary role of the Authors Eleven, a cricket side of London-based writers active between 1899 and 1912, is explored through three case studies. George Ives was a pioneering campaigner for gay rights, who used cricket to bolster his homosexual identity. E. W. Hornung, creator of the famous cricketer-thief Raffles, saw cricket as the ideal training – and analogy – for imperialism. And P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, first made his name writing cricket-filled magazine pieces. All three writers saw their involvement in cricket, particularly the Authors Eleven in-group, as an essential component of their social status. The Authors Eleven thus presents a potent example of embodied sociability, whereby the specific nature of what these individuals were doing together (in this case, playing cricket) has a bearing on their friendships and their intellectual outlooks. As ways of understanding the lives and cultural significance of historical figures, shared physical activity and embodied sociability need to be accorded much more importance than they have been hitherto.

Focusing on the hadra ritual of the ‘Issawiya Sufi community, in this article Dia Barghouti explores how the narrative of the Prophet Muhammad's ‘night journey’ is performed within the Tunisian socio-cultural context. Drawing on the philosophical writings of the twelfth-century Sufi saint Muhyidin Ibn ‘Arabi, the author examines how re-enacting narratives of transcendence, and particularly of myths associated with the patron saint of the order, Sidi Ben-’Issa, allows members of the ‘Issawiya community to explore the ontological principles of Sufi cosmology by experiencing them directly in the body. Dia Barghouti is a playwright and PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her plays have been performed at Ashtar Theatre and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah in Palestine.

Relational, body-oriented and brain-based approaches to recovery and change are increasingly popular modalities for working with traumatised children and adults. However, although these approaches encourage the awareness, and the harnessing of workers’ visceral experiences, there is little in the literature to describe how practitioners navigate their own somatic maps. In a research project undertaken from 2008–16, I invited nine human service workers to tell and explore stories about their own experiences of the body that emerged during, and/or in relation to, their own professional practice. A narrative methodology was used to help facilitate a depth of understanding of how the participants used their own bodies as a source of knowledge and/or as an intervention strategy with those with whom they worked. In this paper, I explore one of many stories told by Coral in which she describes the processes she uses to navigate her own somatic map as she interacts with clients and workers in a domestic violence service. I conclude that creating spaces for workers to explore embodied experience in the professional conversation is important, but is difficult without an acceptable discourse or narrative template. Nonetheless, given the opportunity, including the ‘body as subject’ encourages better outcomes for clients and provides richer accounts of human service workers’ professional experience.

English speakers expressing futurity have the choice of two primary verb forms, will or be going to (BGT). Previous studies establish that BGT has multiple meanings not associated with will. Langacker (1987) rejected a metaphoric analysis of BGT (time is motion) as inadequate and offered a binary feature analysis. Brisard (2001) expanded on this analysis and argued that manipulating the configurations of binary features explains the semantic differences between will and BGT. However, Brisard’s analysis overlooks the semantic overlap among will, BGT, and the simple present. Moreover, it does not provide a framework that treats will and BGT as part of the larger English modal verb system. Finally, it lacks a persuasive explanation of how the meanings associated with will versus BGT arose. We address these gaps by proposing a polysemy-based explanation that emphasizes invited inferences (e.g., Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994) and embodied experience; a particularly novel aspect of the analysis is that all the meanings of BGT are related straightforwardly to components of the human walk cycle. Further, we argue that the shared future meaning of will and BGT represent inter-lexical polysemy (Evans, 2015b), thus providing additional evidence for the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM).