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 gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

This chapter presents the role and use of gesture in first language development and its integration in the child’s multimodal communicative system. It includes an overview of theories and methods that have triggered and facilitated the study of gestures in language development. The main issues are illustrated with detailed analyses of examples extracted from longitudinal data in English and French. The human communication system develops in a space of shared meanings in which adults socialize children into language in situated activities; consequently, this overview highlights the crucial role of caregivers in child–adult interactions. We first focus on the role of gestures in adults’ communicative input and then follow children’s development into the use of the adults’ multimodal communicative system. At the end of the developmental process, speech becomes clearly predominant but is both complemented and supplemented by other semiotic resources according to variables such as linguistic context, situation, interlocutor, activity, or discourse genre. Children learn to master the dynamic multimodal communicative system used around them and with them in their daily interactions.

This chapter reviews the study of variation in gesture and its theoretical underpinnings in the field of gesture studies. It questions the use of culture, language, or nationality as the default unit of analysis in studies of gesture variation. Drawing on theoretical developments in sociolinguistics and recent anthropologial analyses of gesture, it argues for the possibility that social factors and divisions other than linguistic/cultural boundaries may provide a more robust and comprehensive theoretical account for variation in gesture.

First, how does the human cognitive system give rise to gestures? A growing body of literature suggests that gestures are based in people’s perceptual and physical experience of the world. Second, do gestures influence how people take in information from the world? Research suggests that producing gestures modifies producers’ experience of the world in specific ways. Third, does externalizing information in gestures affect cognitive processing? There is evidence that expressing spatial and motoric information in gestures has consequences for thinking, including for memory and problem solving. Fourth, how do gestures influence other people’s cognitive processing? Research indicates that gestures can highlight certain forms of information for others’ thinking, thus engaging social mechanisms that influence cognitive processing. Gestures are closely tied to action, and they reveal how producers schematize information in the objects, tasks, events, and situations that they gesture about. In brief, gestures play an integral role in cognition, both for gesture producers and for gesture recipients, because they are actions of the body that bridge the mind and the world.

Chapter 7 discusses the theory of simulation semantics, which claims that people spontaneously create mental simulations of the objects and actions expressed in language as part of the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and production. When hearing a sentence like, “He kicked the ball, and it bounced off a tree into the pond,” our brain subconsciously uses the same neural assemblies that are involved in physically moving a leg to kick and watching an object move, while it also accesses experientially based memories that function as schematic representations of balls, trees, and ponds. CL studies further demonstrate how mental simulation is involved in comprehension of abstract and metaphorical language and how mental simulation can be shaped by syntactic structures, and preliminary research has been done to tease apart how mental simulation differs for L1 versus L2 comprehension. The chapter suggests ways in which new understandings of embodied cognition can inform the teaching and learning of Chinese in the classroom.

Chapter 5 explores the complexity inherent in metaphoric mappings as a result of their reliance on both the conceptual structuring of the source domain of space and the language used in a metaphoric statement.

The corporeal dimensions of prayer before icons are often attributed to superstition, antiquated beliefs, or a “graced” function of metaphysical participation. In contrast to this, I develop a phenomenological analysis of corporeal substitution as a real possibility of ordinary experience, for an absent person we love strongly can come to presence in a thing before us and provoke a corporeal response. Guided by the story of the acheiropoieton, the “icon made without hands,” I show how the structure of this ordinary human practice is altered when elevated to prayerful substitution, and through its repetition over time, this allows the icon to serve as a means of communion for the believer across both visual and corporeal dimensions.

Chapter 3 examines the core creative practice at the heart of the institution and tradition of the Theater an der Ruhr and most public theatres in Germany: the rehearsal. Rehearsals are not merely the most significant spaces for the training of the body and elaboration of a play. They are also practices for the cultivation of a particular form of comportment described by actors and directors as Haltung. The rehearsing of Haltung, which is discussed as an example of an ethnographic concept, that is, one stemming from the theorising of my interlocutors, constitutes the fundamental ethical practice and internal good facilitated by the institutional tradition of the Theater an der Ruhr. This chapter examines the broader significance of studying the learning of conduct during rehearsals and makes a case for their study as foundational to an understanding of creativity and self-formation in theatre. It also investigates issues of authority and discipline, thinking about rehearsals as a form of social practice rather than an artistic means to create a staging.

The introduction starts with a concise discussion of three capsule examples (Chris Ware’s McSweeney’s anthology, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and Seth’s design for The Complete Peanuts, all published in 2004) as different markers of the archival impulse in the graphic novel. From there, and relying on these examples, the chapter sets out the methodological problems that come with historicizing the graphic novel by analyzing the backward look of contemporary cartoonists. It tackles three core issues: definitional and media-historical questions around the graphic novel, canonization and what gets forgotten in today’s cartoonists’ limited embrace of the past, and the archival turn in comics studies. It finishes by introducing the notion of gestures of transmission as a way of approaching comics memory as a visual material culture that is variously reframed, reshaped, and redrawn into the present.