Geneviève Calbris’ semiotic study of French gestures began in the 1970s and shows how gestural signs interface between the concrete and the abstract. Created by analogical links originating in physical experience of the world via processes of mimesis and metonymy, they are activated by contexts of use and constitute diverse semantic constructions: Gesture is able to evoke several notions alternatively (polysemy) or simultaneously (polysign). As expressions of perceptual schemas extracted from physical experience, they prefigure concepts. A Saussurean perspective brings to light relations between physical features of gestures (signifiers) and the notions (signifieds) they are apt to evoke; it reveals signifiers that are common to different gestures (paradigmatic axis of substitution) and how signifiers interweave in gestural sequencing (syntagmatic axis of combination). Gesture expresses, animates, explains, synthesizes information, and anticipates speech. We highlight its utterance functions, its simultaneous multireferentiality, the gestural anticipation of verbal information, and the interplay of tension-relaxation between conversation partners that this can create.