ABSTRACT
I n this chapter I would like to reexamine some of the traditional dichotomies between language and gesture. In order to do so, it will be necessary to consider a three-way contrast-spoken languages, signed languages, and gesture. Without this three-way comparison, we risk collapsing contrasts between visual and auditory media with contrasts between linguistic structure and co-linguistic gestural structure. Such a comparison clearly belongs in this volume because Dan Slobin’s work on Thinking for Speaking has provided a crucial impetus to the research which feeds my new evaluation-both his own work on spoken and signed language, and the new perspectives on co-speech gesture which have been inspired by that work, not to mention his general intellectual inuence on my work for the last 30 years. Dan has never been never afraid to cross boundaries between modalities-or to be skeptical about accepted dichotomies. So I hope readers will see this chapter as being in his tradition.
