Bringing together twenty-five years of research, Why We Gesture offers a radical new perspective on gesture-speech unity.

The craft of gesture is part of the practical equipment with which we inhabit and understand the world together. Drawing on micro-ethnographic research in diverse interaction settings, this book explores the communicative ecologies in which hand-gestures appear: illuminating the world around us, depicting it, making sense of it, and symbolizing the interaction process itself. Gesture is analyzed as embodied communicative action grounded in the hands' practical and cognitive engagments with material worlds. The book responds to the quest for the role of the human body in cognition and interaction with an analytic perspective informed by phenomenology, conversation analysis, context analysis, praxeology, and cognitive science. Many of the cross-linguistic video-data of everyday interaction investigated in its chapters are available on-line.

Volume II of the handbook offers a unique collection of exemplary case studies. In five chapters and 99 articles it presents the state of the art on how body movements are used for communication around the world. Topics include the functions of body movements, their contexts of occurrence, their forms and meanings, their integration with speech, and how bodily motion can function as language. By including an interdisciplinary chapter on ‘embodiment’, volume II explores the body and its role in the grounding of language and communication from one of the most widely discussed current theoretical perspectives. Volume II of the handbook thus entails the following chapters: VI. Gestures across cultures, VII. Body movements: functions, contexts and interactions, VIII. Gesture and language, IX. Embodiment: the body and its role for cognition, emotion, and communication, X. Sign Language: Visible body movements as language. Authors include: Mats Andrèn, Richard Asheley, Benjamin Bergen, Ulrike Bohle, Dominique Boutet, Heather Brookes, Penelope Brown, Kensy Cooperrider, Onno Crasborn, Seana Coulson, James Essegby, Maria Graziano, Marianne Gullberg, Simon Harrison, Hermann Kappelhoff, Mardi Kidwell, Irene Kimbara, Stefan Kopp, Grigoriy Kreidlin, Dan Loehr, Irene Mittelberg, Aliyah Morgenstern, Rafael Nuñez, Isabella Poggi, David Quinto-Pozos, Monica Rector, Pio Enrico Ricci-Bitti, Göran Sonesson, Timo Sowa, Gale Stam, Eve Sweetser, Mark Tutton, Ipke Wachsmuth, Linda Waugh, Sherman Wilcox.

In a bid to dissect criminal body language, there are a lot of things attached to it which must first be understood. In this book, many of those issues were tackled and body language of criminals was discussed in the basic terms—nothing blurring or too technical to be understood. Even though suspects do deny their involvement in a crime they are being interrogated for, the signs are subtly written all over their body and it only takes a body language expert to decode them. This book is an invaluable guide to every law enforcement officer and everyone who craves for a tranquil society.

Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilém Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions—from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning—in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it. These essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures.

This book explores how we move our hands when we talk, and what it means when we do so. Focusing on what we can discover about speakers—adults and children alike—by watching their hands, Goldin-Meadow discloses the active role that gesture plays in conversation and, more fundamentally, in thinking.

With a foreword by well-known neuroscientist Alain Berthoz, The Style of Gestures convincingly makes the case that embodied cognition is essential to the reception, understanding, and enjoyment of art and literature.

This first book-length study of Irish educator, clergyman, and author Gilbert Austin as an elocutionary rhetor investigates how his work informs contemporary scholarship on delivery, rhetorical history and theory, and embodied communication. Authors Sara Newman and Sigrid Streit study Austin’s theoretical system, outlined in his 1806 book Chironomia; or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery—an innovative study of gestures as a viable, independent language—and consider how Austin’s efforts to incorporate movement and integrate texts and images intersect with present-day interdisciplinary studies of embodiment. Austin did not simply categorize gesture mechanically, separating delivery from rhetoric and the discipline’s overall goals, but instead he provided a theoretical framework of written descriptions and illustrations that positions delivery as central to effective rhetoric and civic interactions. Balancing the variable physical elements of human interactions as well as the demands of communication, Austin’s system fortuitously anticipated contemporary inquiries into embodied and nonverbal communication. Enlightenment rhetoricians, scientists, and physicians relied on sympathy and its attendant vivacious and lively ideas to convey feelings and facts to their varied audiences. During the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries, as these disciplines formed increasingly distinct, specialized boundaries, they repurposed existing, shared communication conventions to new ends. While the emerging standards necessarily diverged, each was grounded in the subjective, embodied bedrock of the sympathetic, magical tradition.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry.

In Gestures of Concern Chris Ingraham shows that while gestures such as sending a “Get Well” card may not be instrumentally effective, they do exert an intrinsically affective force on a field of social relations. From liking, sharing, posting, or swiping to watching a TED Talk or wearing an “I Voted” sticker, such gestures operate as much through affective registers as they do through overt symbolic action. Ingraham demonstrates that gestures of concern are central to establishing the necessary conditions for larger social or political change because they give the everyday aesthetic and rhetorical practices of public life the capacity to attain some socially legible momentum. Rather than supporting the notion that vociferous public communication is the best means for political and social change, Ingraham advances the idea that concerned gestures can help to build the affective communities that orient us to one another with an imaginable future in mind. Ultimately, he shows how acts that many may consider trivial or banal are integral to establishing those background conditions capable of fostering more inclusive social or political change.