The Impulse to Gesture

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.

'Harrison's book offers an excellent example for how multimodal language use can be approached with a focus on grammatical phenomena. Numerous nicely discussed examples and a well-grounded discussion of theoretical and methodological aspects for such an endeavor make the book attractive to students as well as advanced scholars interested in a usage-based perspective on multimodal language use.' Jana Bressem, Journal of Pragmatics

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