This chapter takes seriously the concerns of Eliot’s early reviewers with a tension in her fiction between the devoted depiction of life later associated with realism, and a didactic impulse to which they increasingly felt she succumbed. Asking why Eliot interrupted representation with theorisation, the chapter takes as a case study her alternating dramatisation and analysis of incongruous versions of history in Chapter 20 of Middlemarch. It traces the lineage of such alternation, via an allusion to her friend John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, into one of the notebooks Eliot used as she developed Middlemarch, which is read less as a source for either the novel’s theories or its facts than as a laboratory for its experiments in moving between them. The chapter suggests that Eliot valued the dissonance her reviewers detected when dogma intruded upon depiction. It thereby elucidates her contribution to the dialectical novel of ideas this book explores.

Iconic aspects of postures and hand movements have long been a central issue in gesture research. A speaker’s body may become a dynamic, viewpointed ‘icon’ (Peirce 1960) of someone or something else, or hands may create iconic signs. Recent research on iconicity in spoken and signed languages has (re)established its constitutive role in language (e.g. Jakobson 1990) and more broadly in multimodal interaction, which naturally includes iconic manual gestures and full-body enactments. Peircean semiotics are combined with cognitive linguistic accounts to demonstrate the role of iconicity in embodied conceptual and linguistic structures and to account for modality-specific manifestations of iconicity in gesture. We provide an overview of gestural modes of representation and techniques of depiction and exemplify the ways in which iconicity interacts with other semiotic principles, such as indexicality, viewpoint, and metonymy. The chapter also highlights empirical research into gestural iconicity as it relates to language acquisition, development, and processing, language and cognition, and the fields of computation and robotics.

What concept does the word ‘belief’ express, and how does it fit into the Theory of Mind? In its repertoire of syntactic niches (some not noticed in the literature) and in its range from stereotypical to marginal cases, "believe" is quite a typical word. The analysis offered here reveals striking grammatical and semantic parallels to expressions that denote depictions, such as "picture," "map," and "performance." These parallels provide unexpected solutions to classical philosophical puzzles about "belief." The analysis is extended to other propositional attitude predicates, to speech–act predicates, to predicates of actional attitude such as "intend" and "vow," and to commitment to norms of all sorts. These conclusions provide a sense of the richness of folk psychology and of how detailed linguistic analysis can uncover it, presenting challenges for future research.

The use of the present tense to refer to the past in scenic narrative, that is, narrative passages where discourse time comes close to story time, depends on the pretense that the past events are being currently re-enacted. This pretense is facilitated by a mimetic style of narrating: the narrative is construed in such a way that the activity of processing the narrative is similar to the processing of actual experience. This is achieved in three ways. First, by narrating events that are concrete and appeal to our sensorimotor faculties. Second, by depicting the narrative events through gesture, direct speech representation, sound symbolism, and other means. Third, by using simple grammar to mimic the immediacy of actual experience. Moreover, the present tense is more likely to be used when the narrated events are high in communicative dynamism, which means that they are particularly newsworthy or important for the development of the discourse.

The chapter discusses how cultural institutions and artefacts affect the shared workspace framework. We first consider the integration of linguistic and non-linguistic information in the shared workspace when interlocutors do such things as jointly constructing flat-pack furniture. We show how the framework is ideally suited for such integration of signs and non-signs as part of the activity. We then consider how different activity types serve to refine dialogue games. Finally we consider how cultural artefacts augment the shared workspace to support alignment. We consider the role of illustration, recording and other communication technologies.