Download or read book The Impulse to Gesture written by Simon Harrison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gestures are central to the way people use language when they interact. This book places our impulse to gesture at the very heart of linguistic structure: grammar. Based on the phenomenon of negation - a linguistic universal with clear grammatical and gestural manifestations - Simon Harrison argues that linguistic concepts are fundamentally multi modal and shows how they lead to recurrent bindings between grammar and gesture when people speak. Studying how speakers express negation multi modally in a range of social and professional contexts, Harrison explores how and when people gesture, what people achieve linguistically and discursively with their gestures, and why we find similar uses of gesture in different languages (including spoken and signed language). Establishing the inseparability of grammar and gesture, this book is an important reference for any researcher interested in the relation between language, gesture, and cognition.