The Growth Point

doi:10.1017/9781108638869.019

18 - The Growth Point

from Part IV - Gestures in Relation to Cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2024

David McNeill

Edited by

Alan Cienki

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Alan Cienki: Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

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Summary

A growth point captures the moment of speaking, taking a first-person view. It is thought in language, imbued with mental/social energy, and unpacked into a sentence. It is not a translation of gesture into speech. It is a process of processes. One is the psychological predicate (a notion from Vygotsky), a differentiation of context for what is newsworthy, the growth point’s core meaning – the context reshaped into a field of equivalents to make the differentiation meaningful. The core meaning has dual semiosis – opposite semiotic modes – a global-synthetic gesture and analytics-segmented speech, synchronized and coexpressive of the core. The gesture phases foster the synchronization. Cohesive threads to other growth points (a “catchment”) enrich it. A dialectic provides the growth point’s unpacking – the gesture becoming the thesis, the coexpressive speech the antithesis. Jointly, they create the dialectic synthesis. The dialectic synthesis and the unpacking are the same summoned construction-plus-gesture. The growth point, its processes fulfilled, inhabits the speaker’s being, taking up a position in the world of meaning it has created (conception from Merleau-Ponty).

Keywords

being catchment coexpressivity cohesion dialectic dual semiosis dynamic and static field of equivalents gesture phases material carrier psychological predicate

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies , pp. 477 - 500

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108638869.019 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024

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18 - The Growth Point

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