Pointing has captured the interest of scholars from various fields who study communication.However, ideas and findings have been scattered across disciplines, and opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange have been very limited. The editor's aim is to provide an arena for such exchange by bringing together papers on pointing gestures from disciplines such as developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, sign-language linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversational analysis, and primatology.

The volume can be used as a required text in a course on gestural communication with multidisciplinary perspectives. It can also be used as a supplemental text in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on interpersonal communication, cross-cultural communications, language development, and psychology of language.