Jurgen Streeck’s book Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning is a good summary of Streeck’s cross-linguistic research on the interaction of gesture and speech in meaning creation. The book is pre-theoretical, for the most part, but Streeck does make an important claim that the biological covariation in a speaker or hearer across the somatosensory modes of gesture, vision, audition, and speech do the work of abstraction—which is an unsolved problem in my book.
Streeck’s claim happens to converge with Eric Kandel’s hypothesis that abstraction happens when neurological activity covaries across different somatosensory modes. After all, the only things that CAN covary across, say, musical tone changes in the ear and dance moves in the arms, legs, trunk, and head, are abstract relations. Temporal synchronicity and sequence, say.
Another interesting book is Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins. Hutchins goes rather too far in the direction of externalizing cognition from the participants in the act of knowing, but he does make it clear that cultures build tools into the environment that offload thinking function and effort, to the general benefit of all concerned. Those tools get included by their users in the manufacture of online meaning, to the point that the online meaning can’t be reconstructed from the words alone.
The whole field of conversation analysis goes into the micro-organization of interactive utterances from a linguistic point of view rather than a cognitive perspective. The focus is on the social and communicative functions of empirically attested language structures as demonstrated by the speakers themselves to one another. Anything written by John Heritage in that vein is worth reading, IMO.
EDIT: Revised, consolidated, and expanded bibliography on interactive construction of meaning:
LINGUISTICS
Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff
The Singing Neaderthals, by Steven Mithen
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS & GESTURE RESEARCH
Handbook of Conversation Analysis, by Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers
Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning, by Jurgen Streeck
Pointing: Where Language, Culture, and Cognition Meet, by Sotaro Kita
Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, by Adam Kendon
Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think, by Susan Goldin-Meadow
Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, by David McNeill
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Symbols and Embodiment, edited by Manuel de Vega, Arthur M Glenberg, & Arthur C Graesser
Jurgen Streeck’s book Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning is a good summary of Streeck’s cross-linguistic research on the interaction of gesture and speech in meaning creation. The book is pre-theoretical, for the most part, but Streeck does make an important claim that the biological covariation in a speaker or hearer across the somatosensory modes of gesture, vision, audition, and speech do the work of abstraction—which is an unsolved problem in my book.
Streeck’s claim happens to converge with Eric Kandel’s hypothesis that abstraction happens when neurological activity covaries across different somatosensory modes. After all, the only things that CAN covary across, say, musical tone changes in the ear and dance moves in the arms, legs, trunk, and head, are abstract relations. Temporal synchronicity and sequence, say.
Another interesting book is Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins. Hutchins goes rather too far in the direction of externalizing cognition from the participants in the act of knowing, but he does make it clear that cultures build tools into the environment that offload thinking function and effort, to the general benefit of all concerned. Those tools get included by their users in the manufacture of online meaning, to the point that the online meaning can’t be reconstructed from the words alone.
The whole field of conversation analysis goes into the micro-organization of interactive utterances from a linguistic point of view rather than a cognitive perspective. The focus is on the social and communicative functions of empirically attested language structures as demonstrated by the speakers themselves to one another. Anything written by John Heritage in that vein is worth reading, IMO.
EDIT: Revised, consolidated, and expanded bibliography on interactive construction of meaning:
LINGUISTICS
Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff
The Singing Neaderthals, by Steven Mithen
CONVERSATION ANALYSIS & GESTURE RESEARCH
Handbook of Conversation Analysis, by Jack Sidnell & Tanya Stivers
Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning, by Jurgen Streeck
Pointing: Where Language, Culture, and Cognition Meet, by Sotaro Kita
Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, by Adam Kendon
Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think, by Susan Goldin-Meadow
Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, by David McNeill
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Symbols and Embodiment, edited by Manuel de Vega, Arthur M Glenberg, & Arthur C Graesser
Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins
Thanks! Neat.