Review of research on gesture

[Eve E. SWEETSER]

Well, although Sherman is quite right, let me emphasize that it's not ONLY
sign linguists.  There are quite a few linguists in the International
Society for Gesture Studies meetings, and there are now regularly sessions
on co-speech gesture at cognitive linguistic meetings such as ICLC and
CSDL.  It may be true that outside of functionalist and cognitivist
linguistics, linguistics is done without consideration of gesture; it is
even true that MOST cog and funk linguists are still ignoring gesture.  But
there is a lively interdisciplinary group of linguists (sign linguists and
spoken-language linguists) who do regularly and seriously consider language
in multimodal context.

Eve


On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 2:33 PM, Everett, Daniel <DEVERETT at bentley.edu>wrote:

> Obviously I am not talking about people who have “spent their careers”
> doing this. I am talking to the average linguist.
>
> However, the fact that you use sign language as your example suggests that
> the work of McNeill might be profitably be explored.
>
> Dan
>
> On May 9, 2014, at 12:30 AM, Sherman Wilcox <wilcox at unm.edu> wrote:
>
> > On 8 May 2014, at 15:22, Everett, Daniel wrote:
> >
> >> This doesn't quite get the point, Sherman. Gesture is not sign
> language, though that is part of the continuum.
> >
> > My point was not that gesture is sign language. My point was that lots
> of people have been exploring the relation of language and gesture for a
> long time. Those of us who have spent our careers doing this have not been
> working in a gesture vacuum.
> >
> > --
> > Sherman
>
>