The Impulse to Gesture Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect

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.

Simon Harrison is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of English at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. His research has played a central role in bridging the divide between grammar and gesture.