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Gesture and Thought - David McNeill
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Gesture and Thought

By: David McNeill

Hardcover | 8 November 2005 | Edition Number 1

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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.
Industry Reviews
"What he is passionate about is the very stuff you would do if you put this paper down and started to explain to someone nearby what you were reading about - in other words, 'the spontaneous, ephemeral, made-up-on-the-fly' gesturing you do all day, maybe even in your dreams, though you probably barely notice it. And you probably never gave it a second's thought, although to McNeill it is a snapshot of your thinking, a window to your mind, the best way - without neurosurgery - of getting to peek inside your brain." - Barbara Mahaney, Chicago Tribune"

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