Last update:
9 February 2010
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Metaphor and Gesture
2008. ix, 306 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 2843 7 / EUR 99.00 / USD 149.00
e-Book
– Available from e-book platforms
This volume is the first to offer an overview on metaphor and gesture — a new multi-disciplinary area of research. Scholars of metaphor have been paying increasing attention to spontaneous gestures with speech; meanwhile, researchers in gesture studies have been focussing on the abstract ideas which receive physical representation through metaphors when speakers gesture. This book presents a snapshot of the state of the art in these converging fields, offering research papers as well as commentaries from multiple perspectives. In addition to conceptual metaphor theory it includes different theoretical approaches to semiotics, and the methods used range from controlled experimentation, to cognitive ethnography, to lexical semantic analysis. The use of metaphor in gesture is shown to reflect idiosyncracies of thought in the moment of speaking as well as structural, cultural, and interactional patterns. The series of commentaries discusses the potential importance of studying metaphor and gesture from the perspectives of such fields as anthropology, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, psychology, and semiotics.
Table of contents
“This is a wonderful, well-written and accessible collection that provides rich examples of some of the most interesting and important contemporary research on the ties between embodiment and the distinctively human infrastructure for cognition provided by metaphor. In addition to providing a state of the art snapshot of much contemporary work on gesture, the diversity of theoretical perspectives gathered here offers illuminating examples of new and important approaches to the study of cognition, including the embodied nature of platonic structures in mathematics, to the part played by material anchors in linking cognition to the physical and social world, the biological ground provided by the symmetry of the human body, the dynamic unfolding of gesture and thought, etc. This is a very stimulating introduction to a diverse body of important work probing the relationship between the body, language and cognition.”
Charles Goodwin, UCLA
“This collection and the research reported in this study provide an important step forward in our understanding of the complex phenomena of metaphor and gesture. [...] For the newcomers and those who are not familiar with work on metaphor and gesture, this volume is very helpful and makes it a research topic. For those who are familiar with these research fields, the book provides useful insights and new viewpoints.”
Subject classification |
Linguistics