Language, Gesture, and Space

Language, Gesture, and Space
Author: Karen Emmorey
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134779739

This book brings together papers which address a range of issues regarding the nature and structure of sign languages and other gestural systems, and how they exploit the space in which they are conveyed. The chapters focus on five pertinent areas reflecting different, but related research topics: * space in language and gesture, * point of view and referential shift, * morphosyntax of verbs in ASL, * gestural systems and sign language, and * language acquisition and gesture. Sign languages and gestural systems are produced in physical space; they manipulate spatial contrasts for linguistic and communicative purposes. In addition to exploring the different functions of space, researchers discuss similarities and differences between visual-gestural systems -- established sign languages, pidgin sign language (International Sign), "homesign" systems developed by deaf children with no sign language input, novel gesture systems invented by hearing nonsigners, and the gesticulation that accompanies speech. The development of gesture and sign language in children is also examined in both hearing and deaf children, charting the emergence of gesture ("manual babbling"), its use as a prelinguistic communicative device, and its transformation into language-like systems in homesigners. Finally, theoretical linguistic accounts of the structure of sign languages are provided in chapters dealing with the analysis of referential shift, the structure of narrative, the analysis of tense and the structure of the verb phrase in American Sign Language. Taken together, the chapters in this volume present a comprehensive picture of sign language and gesture research from a group of international scholars who investigate a range of communicative systems from formal sign languages to the gesticulation that accompanies speech.

Language, Gesture, and Space

Language, Gesture, and Space
Author: Karen Emmorey
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134779666

This book brings together papers which address a range of issues regarding the nature and structure of sign languages and other gestural systems, and how they exploit the space in which they are conveyed. The chapters focus on five pertinent areas reflecting different, but related research topics: * space in language and gesture, * point of view and referential shift, * morphosyntax of verbs in ASL, * gestural systems and sign language, and * language acquisition and gesture. Sign languages and gestural systems are produced in physical space; they manipulate spatial contrasts for linguistic and communicative purposes. In addition to exploring the different functions of space, researchers discuss similarities and differences between visual-gestural systems -- established sign languages, pidgin sign language (International Sign), "homesign" systems developed by deaf children with no sign language input, novel gesture systems invented by hearing nonsigners, and the gesticulation that accompanies speech. The development of gesture and sign language in children is also examined in both hearing and deaf children, charting the emergence of gesture ("manual babbling"), its use as a prelinguistic communicative device, and its transformation into language-like systems in homesigners. Finally, theoretical linguistic accounts of the structure of sign languages are provided in chapters dealing with the analysis of referential shift, the structure of narrative, the analysis of tense and the structure of the verb phrase in American Sign Language. Taken together, the chapters in this volume present a comprehensive picture of sign language and gesture research from a group of international scholars who investigate a range of communicative systems from formal sign languages to the gesticulation that accompanies speech.

Language and Gesture

Language and Gesture
Author: David McNeill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2000-08-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521777612

Landmark study on the role of gestures in relation to speech and thought.

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics
Author: Barbara Dancygier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1427
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108146139

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

Discourse, Tools and Reasoning

Discourse, Tools and Reasoning
Author: Lauren B. Resnick
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1997-11-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9783540635116

To reason is to talk. To think is to use tools. To learn is to join a community of practice. This book explores thought and reasoning as inherently social practices, as actions situated in specific environments of demand, opportunity, and accountability. Authors from diverse disciplines - psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology - examine how people think and learn in settings as diverse as a factory, a classroom or an airplane cockpit. The tools that people use in these varied settings are both physical technologies and cultural constructions: concepts, structures of reasoning, and forms of discourse. This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology is based on an international conference on situated cognition and learning technologies.

Gesture and Thought

Gesture and Thought
Author: David McNeill
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0226514641

Gesturing is such an integral yet unconscious part of communication that we are mostly oblivious to it. But if you observe anyone in conversation, you are likely to see his or her fingers, hands, and arms in some form of spontaneous motion. Why? David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, set about answering this question over twenty-five years ago. In Gesture and Thought he brings together years of this research, arguing that gesturing, an act which has been popularly understood as an accessory to speech, is actually a dialectical component of language. Gesture and Thought expands on McNeill’s acclaimed classic Hand and Mind. While that earlier work demonstrated what gestures reveal about thought, here gestures are shown to be active participants in both speaking and thinking. Expanding on an approach introduced by Lev Vygotsky in the 1930s, McNeill posits that gestures are key ingredients in an “imagery-language dialectic” that fuels both speech and thought. Gestures are both the “imagery” and components of “language.” The smallest element of this dialectic is the “growth point,” a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. Utilizing several innovative experiments he created and administered with subjects spanning several different age, gender, and language groups, McNeill shows how growth points organize themselves into utterances and extend to discourse at the moment of speaking. An ambitious project in the ongoing study of the relationship of human communication and thought, Gesture and Thought is a work of such consequence that it will influence all subsequent theory on the subject.

Space in Language and Linguistics

Space in Language and Linguistics
Author: Peter Auer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 708
Release: 2013-11-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110312026

This book brings together three perspectives on language and space that are quite well-researched within themselves, but which so far are lacking productive interconnections. Specifically, the book aims to interconnect the following research areas: Language, space, and geography Grammar, space, and cognition Language and interactional spaces The contributions in this book cover geographical language variation within and across languages, language use in stationary and mobile interactional spaces, computer-mediated communication, and spatial reasoning across languages. This range of issues showcases the thematic and methodological breadth of research on language and space. In order to identify interconnections, the respective contributions are accompanied by commentaries that highlight common threads.

Motion and Space across Languages

Motion and Space across Languages
Author: Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027265364

This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation, the function of linguistic multimodal structures for the codification of motion, the diachronic evolution of motion expressions and its effects on motion typologies, the correspondences between physical and non-physical (fictive, metaphorical) motion, and the impact of contexts and genres on the characterization and interpretation of motion events. These issues are examined from a theoretical and applied linguistic perspective (L1–L2 acquisition, translation/interpreting). The analyses make use of diachronic and synchronic data collected by a range of methods (elicitation, experimentation, and corpus research) in more than fifteen languages. All in all, this book will be of great value to scholars and students interested in the expression of motion and space across languages.

Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics
Author: Alan Cienki
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004336230

Cognitive linguistics is purported to be a usage-based approach, yet only recently has research in some of its subfields turned to spontaneous spoken (versus written) language data. The collection of Alan Cienki’s Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics considers what it means to apply different approaches from within this field to the dynamic, multimodal combination of speech and gesture. The lectures encompass such main paradigms as blending and mental space theory, conceptual metaphor and metonymy, construction and cognitive grammars, image schemas, and mental simulation in relation to semantics. Overall, Alan Cienki shows that taking the usage-based commitment seriously with audio-visual data raises new issues and questions for theoretical models in cognitive linguistics. The lectures for this book were given at The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics in May 2013.