Preface

Summary

This is a book about meaning which concentrates mostly on the interpretation of speech-with -gesture composites. The payoff of studying speech-withgesture is not only to understand gesture as a phenomenon of interest in itself, but – of greater consequence – to help shake linguists and other students of meaning from the view that language is an encapsulated system for conveying meaning. It isn't. What I've learnt from carrying out the work of this book is that meaning is composite and context-grounded no matter how you look at it. The type-level meanings traditionally described in linguistic semantics are never the full meanings that token utterances are taken by interpreters to have, or designed by producers to have.

Standing on the shoulders of a giant pyramid of other midgets, I offer a mere increment on the pioneering efforts of predecessors. The idea of composite utterances as promoted in this book is grounded in a significant prior literature. Those most proximally responsible for the perspective taken here include well-knowns like Adam Kendon, David McNeill, Herb Clark, and Chuck Goodwin, but also some less widely published and cited authors who have, nevertheless, had a direct effect on how I have come to approach the speech-with-gesture problem.