A Review of McNeill , D . ( 1992 ) . Hand and Mind : What Gestures Reveal About Thought

The argument of this original and difficult book is that "gestures are an integral part of language as much as are words, phrases and sentencesgestures and language are one system" (p.2). Gestures are instantaneous, imagistic, analog, holistic expressions of the same thought that speech renders in hierarchical, linear, digital, analytic form. David McNeill credits Adam Kendon (1972, 1980) with discovering the link between, and essential unity of, speech sounds and gestural movements; his own work elaborates this insight at the higher linguistic levels of semantics and pragmatics. The topic of the book, then, is gestures that accompany speech, the left-hand end of what McNeill calls "Kendon's continuum: Gesticulation ~ Language-like Gestures~ Pantomimes ~ Emblems~ Sign Languages" (p.37). The continuum ranges from the informal, spontaneous, idiosyncratic movements of the hands and arms that often accompany speech, to the sociallyregulated, standardized, linguistic forms of a sign language, with its arbitrary (non-iconic) lexicon. Between these poles the obligatory presence of speech declines and the linguistic properties of gestures increase. "Language-like gestures" are grammatically integrated into an utterance, as when a speaker, asked about the weather on his vacation, replies: "Well, it was [oscillating hand gesture]," where the "so-so" gesture replaces an adjectival predicate. "Pantomime" conveys its full meaning in silence or, at most, with inarticulate onomatopoeia; also, in pantomime, sequences of gestures can form a unit, as they can in a sign language, but cannot in gesticulation. "Emblems" conform to standards of well-formedness, a language-like property that gesticulation and pantomime lack: in England, the palm-front Vsign is Churchill's "Victory!," the palm-back V-sign is a sexual insult. (For an amusing cross-class confusion in emblem dialects, see Morris, Collett,