Gesture research

Jürgen Streeck
Table of contents

Research on hand gestures and their roles in social interaction and cognition has fairly exploded in the last two decades. A non-entity to most linguists during the 20th century (among the exceptions: Sapir 1991; Pike 1967), the advent of video technology enabled psychologists, beginning with David McNeill (1985), to investigate what gestures reveal about thought processes or ‘thinking-for-speaking’ (Slobin 1987), and interaction researchers to examine in detail how gestures are coordinated with speech and what functions they serve in everyday communication in the material world. This account of gesture studies is shaped by a pragmatic or praxeological perspective (Streeck 2013, 2017a) which sees gestures as a diverse and evolving set of embodied communicative practices.

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