The first book to bring together the many different everyday gestures that are used all over the world. Desmond Morris has travelled to over 60 countries while making field studies of human body language, and made notes of hand gestures and facial expressions. The result is a fascinating reference book of over 600 different gestures from Europe, the Middle East, North & South America and the Far East. The book is arranged alphabetically under the part of the body used with Meaning, Action, Background and Locality and each gesture is illustrated with a line drawing. The World Guide to Gestures complements Desmond Morris's bestsellers Manwatching and Bodywatching.

In The Gestural Origin of Language, Sherman Wilcox and David Armstrong use evidence from and about sign languages to explore the origins of language as we know it today. According to their model, it is sign, not spoken languages, that is the original mode of human communication. The authors demonstrate that modern language is derived from practical actions and gestures that were increasingly recognized as having the potential to represent, and hence to communicate. In other words, the fundamental ability that allows us to use language is our ability to use pictures or icons, rather than linguistic symbols. Evidence from the human fossil record supports the authors' claim by showing that we were anatomically able to produce gestures and signs before we were able to speak fluently. Although speech evolved later as a secondary linguistic communication device that eventually replaced sign language as the primary mode of communication, speech has never entirely replaced signs and gestures. As the first comprehensive attempt to trace the origin of grammar to gesture, this volume will be an invaluable resource for students and professionals in psychology, linguistics, and philosophy.

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chapters are organised in a systematic fashion, and span a wide range of theoretical research on how language communicates multiple meanings in context, how it influences our daily interactions and relationships with others, and how it helps construct our social worlds. Providing insight into a fascinating array of phenomena and novel research directions, the Handbook is not only relevant to experts of pragmatics but to any reader with an interest in language and its use in different contexts, including researchers in sociology, anthropology and communication, and students of applied linguistics and related areas, as well as professional practitioners in communication research.

Speech sound production is one of the most complex human activities: it is also one of the least well understood. This is perhaps not altogether surprising as many of the complex neurological and physiological processes involved in the generation and execution of a speech utterance remain relatively inaccessible to direct investigation, and must be inferred from careful scrutiny of the output of the system -from details of the movements of the speech organs themselves and the acoustic consequences of such movements. Such investigation of the speech output have received considerable impetus during the last decade from major technological advancements in computer science and biological transducing, making it possible now to obtain large quantities of quantative data on many aspects of speech articulation and acoustics relatively easily. Keeping pace with these advancements in laboratory techniques have been developments in theoretical modelling of the speech production process. There are now a wide variety of different models available, reflecting the different disciplines involved -linguistics, speech science and technology, engineering and acoustics. The time seems ripe to attempt a synthesis of these different models and theories and thus provide a common forum for discussion of the complex problem of speech production. Such an activity would seem particularly timely also for those colleagues in speech technology seeking better, more accurate phonetic models as components in their speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition systems.

Landmark study on the role of gestures in relation to speech and thought.

This study examines the representation of gesture in modernist writing, performance and cinema.

This monograph arose from a conference on the Production of Speech held at the University of Texas at Austin on April 28-30, 1981. It was sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Science, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Linguistics and Psychology Departments. The conference was the second in a series of conferences on human experimental psychology: the first, held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Psychology Department, resulted in publication of the monograph Neural Mechanisms in Behavior, D. McFadden (Ed.), Springer-Verlag, 1980. The choice of the particular topic of the second conference was motivated by the belief that the state of knowledge of speech production had recently reached a critical mass, and that a good deal was to be gained from bringing together the foremost researchers in this field. The benefits were the opportunity for the participants to compare notes on their common problems, the publication of a monograph giving a comprehensive state-of-the-art picture of this research area, and the provision of enormous intellectual stimulus for local students of this topic.