Elements of Meaning in Gesture

Summarizing her pioneering work on the semiotic analysis of gestures in conversational settings, Geneviève Calbris offers a comprehensive account of her unique perspective on the relationship between gesture, speech, and thought. She highlights the various functions of gesture and especially shows how various gestural signs can be created in the same gesture by analogical links between physical and semantic elements. Originating in our world experience via mimetic and metonymic processes, these analogical links are activated by contexts of use and thus lead to a diverse range of semantic constructions rather as, from the components of a Meccano kit, many different objects can be assembled. By (re)presenting perceptual schemata that mediate between the concrete and the abstract, gesture may frequently anticipate verbal formulation. Arguing for gesture as a symbolic system in its own right that interfaces with thought and speech production, Calbris’ book brings a challenging new perspective to gesture studies and will be seminal for generations of gesture researchers.

Dusty Lavoie, Univeristy of Maine, in Journal of Language and Social Psychology, XX(X)1-6, 2012:
Overall, Elements of Meaning in Gesture presents a robust Derridean supplément to Gesture Studies begun in earnest by so many men so many years ago. Thirty years after its inception, Elements of Meaning in Gesture now includes English and French translations of almost all of the hundreds of examples used herein; it is deeply and thoroughly researched; and it is aimed at educated readers with a useful overview of the transdisciplinary subfield known as Gesture Studies. In doing so, it also provides diagrams, appendices, and people and subject indices. These qualities—along with its opening up of a space for potential future research into Gesture Studies’ relationships to re-presentation, to ideological apparatuses, to computer-mediated communication, and to the relevant work of Barthes and Kristeva—give the book opportunities to “serve as an inspiration for psychological, ethnographical, and linguistic studies on gestures with speech” (Müller, 2011, p. 367).