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Description:
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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.
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