This chapter reviews the relation between gesture and the natural signed languages of deaf communities. Signs were for centuries considered to be unanalyzable depictive gestures. Modern linguistic research has demonstrated that signs are composed of meaningless parts, equivalent to spoken language phonemes, that are combined to form meaningful signs. The chapter discusses a system called homesign used where a deaf child with hearing parents is not exposed to signed languages during language acquisition. Two ways in which gesture may become incorporated into a signed language through the historical process of grammaticalization are described. In the first, gestures are incorporated into a signed language as lexical signs, which go on to develop grammatical meaning. In the second, ways in which the sign is produced, its manner of movement, and certain facial displays, are incorporated not as lexical signs but as prosody or intonation, which may develop grammatical meaning. Finally, the chapter critically examines a new view in which certain signs are considered to be fusions of sign and gesture and proposes a cognitive linguistic analysis based in the theory of cognitive grammar.

This chapter offers a toolbox of Methods for Gesture Analysis (MGA). Developed in the context of research on emerging protolinguistic structures in cospeech gestures, the present version of MGA differs from earlier publications (Bressem, Ladewig, Müller 2013; Bressem 2013) in offering sets of tools for gesture analysis that adapt flexibly to different research questions. Essential starting points for MGA are an understanding of hand gestures as temporal forms embedded in a dynamically unfolding context and an understanding of context that itself varies with the adopted framework. The baseline for any chosen tool is a microanalysis that entails some account of the form of the gesture (as temporal form), i.e. ‘form analysis’,and some analysis of how a gesture, a sequence of gestures, a multimodal sequence is placed in a given temporally unfolding context-of-use, i.e. context-analysis. Macroanalyses of gesture dynamics are briefly introduced. MGA offers a toolbox with a flexible set of tools that encourages critical reflection on the insight that can be gained from analyzing gestures in multimodal communication and interaction.

This chapter reviews recent developments that reflect a convergence of work in various branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics around the implications of the incremental sequencing of speech units for understanding grammar and the cognitive processing that underlies the production, comprehension, and interpretation of utterances. Notions from Functional Discourse Grammar are used to present a view of syntactic structure as arising from the incremental extension of holophrases, i.e. minimal utterances. By prioritizing the timecourse of language processing, the chapter interprets syntactic hierarchy as arising from chunk-and-pass operations supported by predictive processing. Spoken dialogue is identified as the primary arena for these processes, with grammaticality subordinated to situational appropriateness. Linguistic data are seen as protocols of joint action aimed at the incremental co-creation of meaning. All of these notions make essential reference to context as constantly active, prior to and during the utterance of the linguistic signal, and as a crucial component of the operations and processes that take place in verbal interaction.

This introduction is a synopsis of the major trends in linguistics discussed in Part III (seventeen chapters).

Part IIIA (late nineteenth century -- 1960s) describes the decline of comparative studies, the rise and culmination of structuralist and descriptive synchronic linguistics, and the different currents in Europe and North America (four chapters).

In Part IIIB (1960s-2000, ‘recent history,'a time of considerable growth in linguistic scholarship, thirteen chapters), the following topics are considered:

• - the rise, development and impact of formal linguistics (i.e., generative approaches to syntax, semantics and phonology, and alternatives) as well as formal and non-formal cognitive approaches;

• - the turn to language use and function: new modes/tools of linguistic inquiry (methods, corpora and lexicography, technology); functionalist reactions to formalism (e.g., pragmatics, American functionalism, systemic functional linguistics); language as a communicative spoken activity (conversation analysis, discourse analysis, ethnography of communication, critical approaches to language use);

• - new interdisciplinary subfields: sociolinguistics (variational sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, language policy and planning), anthropological linguistics, psycholinguistics;

• - historical linguistics (language change, grammaticalization), contact linguistics, pidgins and creoles, approaches to universal-typological linguistics;

• - applied linguistics (language teaching/learning, interdisciplinarity).

The conclusion discusses the editors’ sense of the direction of theoretical developments in linguistics since the 1960s: the general movement towards contextualization.

The chapter provides an overview of work that crosses the linguistics-psychology boundaries.

It presents early influential contributions/developments: Piaget and Vygotsky, Skinner’s behaviorist treatment of language acquisition (and Chomsky’s criticism), computer programming formalism, and the Chomskyan and cognitive revolutions.

It then analyzes research developments from the 1950s, reviews the tenets of generative grammar (especially Universal Grammar) and their role in sentence processing theories (garden-path theory, connectionist models) and describes models of discourse processing, e.g., mental/situation models, Construction-Integration model.

Other topics discussed are:

• - Child language acquisition: its empirical foundations and Chomskyan views about language learnability (poverty of stimulus, critical period of development).

• - Formalization of language processing with computing tools: simulation of language processes, description of representations underlying language processing (e.g., semantic networks, scripts, ACT CCREADER); computational linguistics (e.g., speech recognition, automated translation); corpus linguistics.

• - Social dimensions of language use: pragmatics (Grice’s conversational maxims, Relevance Theory); social psychology (Communication Accommodation Theory).

• - Neurolinguistics: disorders resulting from brain damage; technical advances in brain imaging methods and new insights about language processing networks.

• - Gesture and sign language: gesture-thought relationship; study of sign languages.

• - Cognitive linguistics and the claim that cognitive structures and representational schemes contribute to shaping language structure (e.g., Cognitive Grammar).

After we have seen how the p-model works, this chapter evaluates the p-model’s methodology with respect to current tendencies in the history and philosophy of science.sketches four interrelated processes. First, the fall of the analytical philosophy of science was accompanied by the historical turn that yielded the emergence of the discipline ‘the history and philosophy of science’. Second, as opposed to the earlier programme of unified science, by now the philosophy of science has acknowledged the pluralism of scientific inquiry. Third, there is also a process that has led to the simultaneous presence of the general philosophy of science and the discipline-specific histories and philosophies of science. Finally, there is a pluralism of the specific histories and philosophies of science within the discipline as well. The p-model fits into these processes.reflects on the basic method applied by the history and philosophy of science, namely, case studies. It outlines the p-model’s answer to the question of why the results of single case studies may be generalised and how they can be selected without bias.is devoted to the question of whether our results can be applied to other fields of linguistic research than those mainstream grammatical approaches that the case studies have focused on.