We manipulated perspective taking and measured romantic intimates’ attention to their partners’ context. Participants read a letter supposedly from their romantic partner describing the partner's precarious situation (e.g., stress and financial issues) and either imagined their partner's difficult situation (n = 87) or remained objective and detached (n = 85). Afterwards, they drew a picture of their romantic partner in the situation (drawing task) and wrote about the thoughts they had while reading the letter (writing task). As predicted, when adopting their romantic partner's perspective (vs. remaining detached), geographically close intimates focused more on their partner's context, whereas long-distance intimates relied on self-anchoring processes to produce knowledge about their partner's feelings and thoughts in that specific situation. We discuss theoretical, clinical, and therapeutic implications of the findings for the study of differential perspective-taking processes and mechanisms in long-distance and geographically close relationships.

As speakers, we are frequently called upon to specify the locations of objects and landmarks in our environment. However, despite the considerable body of work on spatial cognition and semantics (i.e. Levinson 1992, 1996, 2003; Tyler and Evans 2003; Herskovits 1986; Vandeloise 1986), there has been almost no research on the expression of location from a multimodal viewpoint: that is, how do speakers use gesture, as well as speech, to express object location? This paper reports on a filmed study of 10 English speakers and 10 French speakers who were asked to express the locations of 28 objects in two spatial scenes. On the basis of our results we argue that a functional, as opposed to a grammatical, approach to the segmentation and analysis of these sorts of expressions is crucial. Such an approach reflects the fact that different Figures (i.e. objects to be located) can exist simultaneously across speech and gesture. Using filmed examples from our data set, we propose a new definition of static locative expressions and outline a multimodal approach for their analysis in oral discourse.

What is the meaning of the apocalyptic events related in the Gospel of Matthew after the death of Jesus? The issue is treated in two stages, beginning with a short review of current interpretations (historical, causal, and semiologic). In a second step, the spatial and temporal disruptions that cross the story are explored. The hypothesis is made, with consideration of the figures’ sequence, that they are the figurative expression of a childbirth. Time and place of death are thus those of a birth, Jesus is literally ‘the firstborn from the dead’. It is finally suggested that the reader's actualisation of this peculiar figures’ chain corresponds to the birth of a believing subject.