This chapter presents the current state of research in multimodal Construction Grammar with a focus on co-speech gestures. We trace the origins of the idea that constructions may have to be (re-)conceptualized as multimodal form–meaning pairs, deriving from the inherently multimodal nature of language use and the usage-based model, which attributes to language use a primordial role in language acquisition. The issue of whether constructions are actually multimodal is contested. We present two current positions in the field. The first one argues that a construction should only count as multimodal if gestures are mandatory parts of that construction. Other, more meaning-centered, approaches rely less on obligatoriness and frequency of gestural (co-)occurrences and either depart from a recurrent gesture to explore the verbal constructions it combines with or focus on a given meaning, for example, negation, and explore its multimodal conceptualization in discourse. The chapter concludes with a plea for more case studies and for the need to develop large-scale annotated corpora and apply statistical methods beyond measuring mere frequency of co-occurrence.

We present an overview of constructional approaches to signed languages, beginning with a brief history and the pioneering work of William C. Stokoe. We then discuss construction morphology as an alternative to prior analyses of sign structure that posited a set of non-compositional lexical signs and a distinct set of classifier signs. Instead, signs are seen as composed of morphological schemas containing both specific and schematic aspects of form and meaning. Grammatical construction approaches are reviewed next, including the marking of argument structure on verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). Constructional approaches have been applied to the issue of the relation between sign and gesture across a variety of expressions. This work often concludes that signs and gesture interact in complex ways. In the final section, we present an extended discussion of several grammatical and discourse phenomena using a constructional analysis based on Cognitive Grammar. The data come from Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and includes pointing constructions, agreement constructions, antecedent-anaphor relations, and constructions presenting point of view in reported narrative.

Chapter 4 continues the previous chapter’s translational approach to the performing body, exploring the potential and limitations of what Walter Mignolo terms the “decolonial gesture” through three award-winning Argentinian productions. Building upon contemporary theories of coloniality, the chapter examines the performers’ and their audience’s linked participation as site for considering how the translational might effectively engage onstage with the “other.” In Timbre 4’s Dínamo (Dynamo), the decolonial gesture is initiated in a performer’s own dramaturgy of nontranslation, which not only impedes linguistic communication but also triggers audience critical self-awareness. In Guillermo Cacace’s production of Mi hijo sólo camina un poco más lento (My Son Only Walks a Bit Slower), a Spanish-language production of a Croatian play, the decolonial gesture resides in the director’s translational reconfiguration of actor-spectator empathy and seemingly contradictory approaches to casting disability. In the chapter’s final case, Sudado (Sweaty/Stew), a collectively devised production, decolonial gesturality is complicated at multiple translational levels through the translocation of the Peruvian immigrant to the Buenos Aires stage. The chapter argues that theatre can offer opportunities for decolonization, but only if they emerge from within theatre’s assembled collective, which translationally determines the creation, construction, communication, and reception of the decolonial gesture.

Conversation-analytic (CA) research projects have begun to involve the collection of interaction data in laboratory settings, as opposed to field settings, not for the purpose of experimentation, but in order to systematically analyze interactional phenomena that are elusive, not in the sense of being rare (i.e., ‘seldom occurring’), but in the sense of not being reliably or validly detected by analysts in the field using relatively standard recording equipment. This chapter (1) describes two, CA, methodological mandates – ‘maintaining mundane realism’ and ‘capturing the entirety of settings’ features’ – and their tensions; (2) provides four examples of elusive phenomena that expose these tensions, including gaze orientation, blinking, phonetic features during overlapping talk, and inhaling; and (3) discusses analytic ramifications of elusive phenomena, and provides a resultant series of data collection recommendations for both field and lab settings.

The late seventeenth century saw the creation of a new affective category, ‘tender passions’ or ‘sentiments’, by female writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry in the salons of Louis XIV’s France. From here into the eighteenth century, sentiments were developed through airs, novels and drama. Contrary to prevalent images of eighteenth-century communicative clarity, sentiments were more socially complex and less easily legible than the ‘passions’ of the Baroque. Their expression on stage required a new realistic dramaturgy, building on the flexible use of ensemble, gesture and mime in comic opera. A characteristically sentimental conception of the dramatic ‘tableau’ resulted. Theorized by Diderot and Rousseau in the 1750s, tableaux aimed to evoke and sustain ‘tender’ sentiments of pity, affection and social solidarity through dramatically heightened moments in the action. These relied on a more spellbinding theatrical illusion, intended to absorb the audience within its all-engrossing atmosphere, and to which music contributed by supporting and highlighting gestures over rhetorical set pieces.

This chapter reviews the relation between gesture and the natural signed languages of deaf communities. Signs were for centuries considered to be unanalyzable depictive gestures. Modern linguistic research has demonstrated that signs are composed of meaningless parts, equivalent to spoken language phonemes, that are combined to form meaningful signs. The chapter discusses a system called homesign used where a deaf child with hearing parents is not exposed to signed languages during language acquisition. Two ways in which gesture may become incorporated into a signed language through the historical process of grammaticalization are described. In the first, gestures are incorporated into a signed language as lexical signs, which go on to develop grammatical meaning. In the second, ways in which the sign is produced, its manner of movement, and certain facial displays, are incorporated not as lexical signs but as prosody or intonation, which may develop grammatical meaning. Finally, the chapter critically examines a new view in which certain signs are considered to be fusions of sign and gesture and proposes a cognitive linguistic analysis based in the theory of cognitive grammar.

This chapter gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

This chapter presents the role and use of gesture in first language development and its integration in the child’s multimodal communicative system. It includes an overview of theories and methods that have triggered and facilitated the study of gestures in language development. The main issues are illustrated with detailed analyses of examples extracted from longitudinal data in English and French. The human communication system develops in a space of shared meanings in which adults socialize children into language in situated activities; consequently, this overview highlights the crucial role of caregivers in child–adult interactions. We first focus on the role of gestures in adults’ communicative input and then follow children’s development into the use of the adults’ multimodal communicative system. At the end of the developmental process, speech becomes clearly predominant but is both complemented and supplemented by other semiotic resources according to variables such as linguistic context, situation, interlocutor, activity, or discourse genre. Children learn to master the dynamic multimodal communicative system used around them and with them in their daily interactions.

This chapter reviews the study of variation in gesture and its theoretical underpinnings in the field of gesture studies. It questions the use of culture, language, or nationality as the default unit of analysis in studies of gesture variation. Drawing on theoretical developments in sociolinguistics and recent anthropologial analyses of gesture, it argues for the possibility that social factors and divisions other than linguistic/cultural boundaries may provide a more robust and comprehensive theoretical account for variation in gesture.

First, how does the human cognitive system give rise to gestures? A growing body of literature suggests that gestures are based in people’s perceptual and physical experience of the world. Second, do gestures influence how people take in information from the world? Research suggests that producing gestures modifies producers’ experience of the world in specific ways. Third, does externalizing information in gestures affect cognitive processing? There is evidence that expressing spatial and motoric information in gestures has consequences for thinking, including for memory and problem solving. Fourth, how do gestures influence other people’s cognitive processing? Research indicates that gestures can highlight certain forms of information for others’ thinking, thus engaging social mechanisms that influence cognitive processing. Gestures are closely tied to action, and they reveal how producers schematize information in the objects, tasks, events, and situations that they gesture about. In brief, gestures play an integral role in cognition, both for gesture producers and for gesture recipients, because they are actions of the body that bridge the mind and the world.

Chapter 7 discusses the theory of simulation semantics, which claims that people spontaneously create mental simulations of the objects and actions expressed in language as part of the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and production. When hearing a sentence like, “He kicked the ball, and it bounced off a tree into the pond,” our brain subconsciously uses the same neural assemblies that are involved in physically moving a leg to kick and watching an object move, while it also accesses experientially based memories that function as schematic representations of balls, trees, and ponds. CL studies further demonstrate how mental simulation is involved in comprehension of abstract and metaphorical language and how mental simulation can be shaped by syntactic structures, and preliminary research has been done to tease apart how mental simulation differs for L1 versus L2 comprehension. The chapter suggests ways in which new understandings of embodied cognition can inform the teaching and learning of Chinese in the classroom.