Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:03:53.358Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

David McNeill, Gesture and thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2007

Leila Monaghan
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA, [email protected]

Extract

David McNeill, Gesture and thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 318. Hb $38.00.

I am a visual and tactile learner myself, and so David McNeill's latest work, Gesture and thought, makes bone deep (or perhaps, following McNeill, brain deep) sense to me. His main argument is that language and gesture are inextricably entwined. He sees “gestures as active participants in speaking and thinking. They are conceived of as ingredients in an imagery-language dialect that fuels speech and thought” (p. 3). He looks closely at how gesture and speech coexist in narrative, presents transcription methods suitable to capturing their interdependence, and, perhaps most importantly, lays out the intellectual framework for why a dynamic, double vision of language is essential to understanding the nature of interactions.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Deacon, Terrence (1996). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: Norton.
Harris, Roy (2002). Why words really do not stay still. Times Literary Supplement, 26 July, 30.
Sacks, Harvey (1972). An initial investigation of the usability of conversational data for doing sociology. In D. N. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in social interaction, 3174. New York: Free Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1966 [1959]). Course in general linguistics. C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, eds., with A. Riedlinger; W. Baskin, trans. New York: McGraw-Hill. Originally published in French in 1915.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (2006 [2002]). Writings in general linguistics. S. Bouquet, R. Engler, C. Sanders & M. Pires eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Based on French ed., Gallimard, 2002.
Schegloff, Emmanual (1987). Some sources of misunderstanding in talk-in-interaction. Linguistics 25:20118.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emmanual; Jefferson, Gail; & Sacks, Harvey (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53:36182.Google Scholar
Sereno, Martin (1991). Language and the primate brain. In Proceedings Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 7984. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Vygotsky, Lev S. (1986). Thought and language. E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, ed. & trans; A. Kozulin, rev. & ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Based on writings from the 1930s.]
Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1941). The relation of habitual thought and behavior in language. In Leslie Spier (ed.), Language, culture, and personality, 7593. Menasha, WI: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund; repr. in J. B. Carroll (ed.), Language, thought, and reality, 134–59.