The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect
Cambridge University Press, 8/23/2018
EAN 9781108417204, ISBN10: 1108417205
Hardcover, 248 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm
Language: English
Gestures are central to the way people use language when they interact. This book places our impulse to gesture at the very heart of linguistic structure: grammar. Based on the phenomenon of negation - a linguistic universal with clear grammatical and gestural manifestations - Simon Harrison argues that linguistic concepts are fundamentally multi modal and shows how they lead to recurrent bindings between grammar and gesture when people speak. Studying how speakers express negation multi modally in a range of social and professional contexts, Harrison explores how and when people gesture, what people achieve linguistically and discursively with their gestures, and why we find similar uses of gesture in different languages (including spoken and signed language). Establishing the inseparability of grammar and gesture, this book is an important reference for any researcher interested in the relation between language, gesture, and cognition.
1. The impulse to gesture
spontaneous but constrained
2. The grammar-gesture nexus
a mechanism for regularity in gesture
3. Sync points in speech
evidence of grammatical affiliation for gesture
4. Gesture as construal
blockage, force, and distance in space and mind
5. Gesture sequences
wrist as hinge for shifts in discourse
6. Patterns of gesturing
the business of 'horizontal palming'
7. Wiping away
embodied interaction in speech and sign
8. Impulse theory
how, when, and why we gesture.