36.3945, Reviews: Gesture: Lauren Gawne (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3945. Mon Dec 22 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3945, Reviews: Gesture: Lauren Gawne (2025)

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Date: 22-Dec-2025
From: Sara Adelino [saraadelino at letras.ufrj.br]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, Psycholinguistics: Lauren Gawne (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1810

Title: Gesture
Subtitle: A Slim Guide
Series Title: Slim Guides
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/gesture-9780192855084?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Lauren Gawne

Reviewer: Sara Adelino

SUMMARY
In 2025, the researcher Lauren Gawne published "Gesture: A slim guide"
(Oxford). This book is a significant addition to the communication
field, providing a necessary and substantial resource for a wide range
of communication enthusiasts. It is a valuable asset for interested
readers, including those who have not received formal education in
languages, as well as postgraduate students and researchers. The
primary objective of this publication is the provision and
introduction of research in the field of gesture, as well as the
dissemination of the latest advances in this area. The objective is
achieved by presenting the nature, function and role of human
intentional movements in communication and their integration into
language, and by describing the common methods and intersectional
areas of study, without sidelining terminology and key concepts.
The author first acknowledges the extensive history of gesture
researchers who preceded her. The sheer number and variety of
gestures, scholars and studies referenced in each chapter is notable,
whatever  the academic consensus or controversy they may represent .
In the same way, this book  builds on years (and indeed decades) of
research and human interaction. Based on this collective work, this
guide seeks to facilitate understanding the impact of gestures on
human communication, catering to readers with varying degrees of
expertise.
Because of the breadth of the theme, Gawne’s work will address, in the
first chapter (“Introduction”), the issue of the definition of
gesture, as well as the reasons why it has attracted the interest of
so many researchers. The intrinsic nature of gestures in language
provides insight into the broader context of human interaction. For
this reason, there are summaries of  research interests in various
disciplines, including but not limited to psychology, computer
science, arts, anthropology and medical sciences. In order to sustain
her endeavour to provide a palatable and engaging guide to the object,
Gawne offered answers to both general questions, such as "Why do we
gesture even though there is no one seeing us?" and specific field
problems, such as "Is there a systematic co-occurrence of gesture
phases with a pragmatic aspect of a verbal utterance?"
The second chapter, entitled "Gesture as an object of study",
delineates what constitutes a gesture, describing a range from
unintentional human movements to sign languages, thereby drawing
boundaries between different types and parameters. At the outset,
Gawne presents the key terminology and related linguistic features,
along with an  overview of the following aspects of gesture: their
structure, their distinctiveness from language, their integration with
language, the predominant methodologies and scientific approaches to
their study, and the historical periods in which they  have garnered
scholarly attention, spanning from ancient to the present days.
The third chapter, entitled "Gesture Categorization", delineates the
typology of gestures, encompassing the most frequently used
categories, their definitions, boundaries, and prototypical examples.
Additionally, the chapter highlights less extensively studied
nomenclatures and gives hints about scientific focus and interests.
These initial three chapters, then, lay a groundwork for the
subsequent topics and chapters. From this base, Gawne proceeds to
delineate the state-of-the-art of interdisciplinary studies concerning
gesture, encompassing its linguistic, cultural, developmental,
cerebral, cognitive, and historical dimensions, along with its
prospective advances.
In the fourth chapter, entitled "Gesture across cultures and
languages", the following questions are posed for discussion: do
gestures influence language, or is it the other way around? How common
are gestures interculturally? Is there a perception of gestures in
certain cultures, and if so, how? Do the same cognitive aspects that
impact language also affect gesture? Conversely, in the fifth chapter
("Gesture Acquisition and Use"), Gawne explores the influence of
audience presence or absence on gesture production, the potential
impact of proper movements on speech/thinking, and the acquisition and
learning of gestures during childhood and second language formal
education, with a focus on both oral and sign languages.
In the sixth chapter, entitled "Gesture and Cognition", Gawne
correlates Broca's and Wernicke's areas with gestures, building upon
the association with the homunculus brain model. Moreover, the author
provides a panorama of communicative kinetics during speech production
and schematises the different models that comprise it. In addition to
the limited number of studies that have been conducted on the subject
of language-gesture perception, the author provides a concise overview
of the integration of movements with pragmatic comprehension, semantic
information, and the type of processing involved.
The seventh chapter, entitled "The past and future", provides a guide
to the final topics of the book. The piece then moves on to explore
the origins of language, engaging in the debate about whether gestures
have a role in language emergence. The concept is accompanied by an
understanding of other species' gesticulation, and the extent to which
similarities and differences can be identified among animal gestures.
And the final topic of the chapter is concerned with the interaction
of people in digital contexts, both with human and machine
interlocutors.
In conclusion, the eighth and final chapter ("Conclusion") provides an
overview of the book's topics, trajectory and achieved objectives.
Gawne highlights the ambition in proposing a guide to this relatively
recent field such that the work encompasses both the foundational
principles for enthusiasts and the depth of analysis required for
scholars. In the concluding pages of the publication, it is evident
that "Gesture: A slim guide" is a gateway to the world of gesture
studies.
EVALUATION
Lauren Gawne's "Gesture: A Slim Guide" is a welcome handbook for those
interested in intentional movements in communication. Despite its
emphasis on multimodal gestures, the book is not narrow in focus but
rather presents a comprehensive overview of gesture studies. It  is
published at a pivotal juncture in the formal development of
linguistics, when the field is increasingly recognising the
significance of gestures, but there is a scarcity of systematic,
comprehensive publications that address this subject for 101 courses.
Thus it is noteworthy that the sources used in this book comprise both
outreach materials (e.g.,news articles, podcast episodes, and social
media posts) and scientific publications, including articles, essays,
and books. The bibliography is thus a valuable source of information
for both introductory studies and reviews of literature.
The guide begins with "Gesture is absolute, in that every human
community that has language also has gestures as part of that
language. But gesture is also incredibly relative, in that it is far
more heavily context dependent than linguistic elements of
communication” (p. 2). Then it maintains that “Gestures form part of
our intentional communicative system, alongside and as part of
language” (p. 9) and also that “Emblem gestures can continue to be
transmitted and maintain their form and meaning even as languages
change around them” (p. 64). The book asserts as well, “[other animal
species’] gestural systems do not show any structuring that we would
recognize as analogous to human language” (p. 130). These quotations
illustrate a single branch of the variety of knowledge on which
gesture scholars are in agreement, as well as the psycho-neuro-social
reality that they continue to ponder and disagree on.
The publication coincides with a productive year for Gesture Studies.
In addition to Zima's Multimodal Construction Grammar (2025),
McNeill's Language is Gesture (2025) and Levinson's The Interaction
Engine (2025), Gawne's second book offers researchers a concise
overview of the relevant literature as well as a comprehensive
resource. The author's expertise is notable in the type of examples
(multimodal gestures and studies) and the depth of references
(cross-cultural studies) that are cited. Nevertheless,  other topics
are not neglected; for instance, she also discusses emblems,
unintentional movements, intercultural perception and biological
features (especially in the context of the origin of language debate,
where gesture is a primary focus). However, these subjects are
allocated less space and attention in the book. Some of these
discursive elements would require the integration of additional
theoretical concepts and a comprehensive elaboration that a solitary
book might not be equipped to offer without becoming exhaustive.
Additional literature on this topic can be  discovered through the
references, including works by Tomasello (2006) and Gawne &
Cooperrider (2024); but also through the incorporation of additional
publications, including articles by Levinson (2023) and Werner, Selen
& Pouw (2024). The absence of extension and depth in some discussions
is indicative of the collective efforts and attentiveness of
researchers over the past few decades. In order to achieve this
objective, it is imperative that the reader engages with the material
in a manner that extends beyond this "slim guide".
REFERENCES
Gawne, L. and Cooperrider, K., 2024. Emblems: Meaning at the interface
of language and gesture. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics,
9(1).
Levinson, S.C., 2023. Gesture, spatial cognition and the evolution of
language. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B,
378(1875), p.20210481.
Levinson, S.C., 2025. The Interaction Engine. Cambridge: MIT Press.
McNeill, D., 2025. Language is Gesture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Werner, R., Selen, L., & Pouw, W. (2024). Arm movements increase
acoustic markers of expiratory flow. bioRxiv, 2024-01.
Tomasello, Michael. (2006). ‘Why don’t apes point?’ In Nicholas J.
Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson (eds), Roots of Human Sociality:
Culture, Cognition and Interaction, pp. 506–24. Oxford:Oxford
University Press.
Zima, E., 2025. Multimodal Construction Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press (Elements in Construction Grammar).
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sara Adelino is an Adjunct Professor in Linguistics at Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro. The researcher is currently working on
the PhD thesis about emblematic gestures and linguistic properties,
within natural languages' architecture.



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