The argument of this original and difficult book is that “gestures are an integral part of language as much as are words, phrases and sentences-gestures 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 “Kenhi’s coiitiiiiiiim: Gesticulation+ Language-like gestures+ Pantomimes 3 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 socially-regulated, 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 wellformedness, a language-like property that gesticulation and pantomime lack: in England, the palm-front V-sign is Churchill’s “Victory!”, the palm-back V-sign is a sexual insult.(For an amusing cross-class confusion in emblem dialects, see Collett, Marsh, and O’Shaughnessy, 1979, p. 229, where Margaret Thatcher appears in an Associated Press Photo, making the palm-back V-sign at a moment of electoral triumph.) The contrast between the two ends of Kendon’s continuum, between spontaneous gesture and conventional sign, epitomizes McNeill’s notion of the process by which an utterance evolves in a speaker’s mind. Spontaneous gesture reveals the primitive stage of an utterance, global, unsegmented, non-hierarchical, from which its conventional representation in speech unfolds: hierarchical, segmented, linear. The inner symbols of the primitive stage are private, idiosyncratic, closed to social influence; the end stage is public, grammatical, socially regulated. McNeill supposes that the primitive