Recurrent gestures are stabilized forms that embody a practical knowledge of dealing with different communicative, interactional, cognitive, and affective tasks. They are often derived from practical actions and engage in semantic and pragmatic meaning-making. They occupy a place between spontaneous (singular) gestures and emblems on a continuum of increasing stabilization. The chapter reconstructs the beginnings of research on recurrent gestures and illuminates different disciplinary perspectives that have explored processes of their emergence and stabilization, as well as facets of their communicative potential. The early days of recurrent-gesture research focused on the identification of single specimens and on the refinement of descriptive methods. In recent years, their role in self-individuation, their social role, and their relationship to signs of sign language have become a focus of interest. The chapter explores the individual, the linguistic, and the cultural side of recurrent gestures. Recurrent gestures are introduced as sedimented individual and social practices, as revealing the linguistic potential of gestures, and as a type that forms culturally shared repertoires.

Gestures associated with negation have become a well-defined area for gesture studies research. The chapter offers an overview of this area, identifies distinct empirical lines of enquiry, and highlights their contribution to aspects of linguistic and embodiment theory. After relating a surge of interest in this topic to the notion of recurrent gestures (but not restricted to it), the chapter offers a visualization of the widespread geographical coverage of studies of gestures associated with negation, then distils a set of common observations concerning the form, organizational properties, and functions of such gestures. This area of research is then further thematized by exploring distinct chains of studies that have adopted linguistic, cognitive-semantic, functional, psycholinguistic, comparative, and cultural perspectives to analyze the gestural expression of negation. Studies of gestures associated with negation are shown to have played a vital role in shaping understandings of the multimodality of grammar, the embodiment of cognition, and the relations between gestures and sign.