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Why Gesture?: How the hands function in speaking, thinking and communicating
Edited by Ruth Breckinridge Church, Martha W. Alibali and Spencer D. Kelly
[Gesture Studies 7] 2017
► pp. 77–101

Chapter 5
Gesture-speech unity

What it is, where it came from

| University of Chicago

Minimal packages of language embodiment have been called growth points (GPs). In a GP gesture and speech are inherent and equal parts. Out of a GP comes speech orchestrated around a gesture. Can theories of language origin explain this dynamic process? A popular theory, gesture-first, cannot; in fact, it fails twice – predicting what did not evolve (that gesture was marginalized when speech emerged), and not predicting what did evolve (that there is gesture-speech unity). A new theory, called Mead’s Loop, is proposed that meets the test. Mead’s Loop agrees that gesture was indispensable to the origin of language but holds that gesture was not first, that any gesture-first could not have led to language, and that to reach it gesture and speech had to be “equiprimordial.”

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The growth point
    • The dialectic
    • Note on terms
  • GP properties
    • Empirical base
    • Minimal units
    • Co-expressiveness and contrast
  • Context
    • The psychological predicate
    • What is “a meaning”?
    • A natural experiment
  • Material carriers and inhabitance
  • Unpacking
  • Language origin
    • Gesture-first
    • Mead’s Loop
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 April 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/gs.7.05mcn
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