The chapter provides an overview of Kendon’s research biography, describing the origins of the theoretical notions and categories for analysis that he developed, e.g. gesture unit, gesture phrase, preparation, stroke, hold, kinesic action, the ways in which gestures can perform referential (through forms of pointing and depiction) and pragmatic functions (including operational, performative, modal, and parsing functions). The data he considered included not only speakers’ gestures, but also signed languages of different types, e.g. those used by the Deaf (primary sign languages), to those used for ritualistic or professional reasons (alternate sign languages). Discussion of the latter notes their structural relation to the spoken languages of their users. Locations and communities in which Kendon studied visible action as utterance include Great Britian, Naples, Italy; Papua New Guinea, and the United States; and among Aboriginal people in Australia. The work finishes with issues related to the study of language origins. Emphasis is placed throughout on the limitations of the term ‘gesture’ and the author’s preference for other terms, such as ‘utterance dedicated visible action’.

First, how does the human cognitive system give rise to gestures? A growing body of literature suggests that gestures are based in people’s perceptual and physical experience of the world. Second, do gestures influence how people take in information from the world? Research suggests that producing gestures modifies producers’ experience of the world in specific ways. Third, does externalizing information in gestures affect cognitive processing? There is evidence that expressing spatial and motoric information in gestures has consequences for thinking, including for memory and problem solving. Fourth, how do gestures influence other people’s cognitive processing? Research indicates that gestures can highlight certain forms of information for others’ thinking, thus engaging social mechanisms that influence cognitive processing. Gestures are closely tied to action, and they reveal how producers schematize information in the objects, tasks, events, and situations that they gesture about. In brief, gestures play an integral role in cognition, both for gesture producers and for gesture recipients, because they are actions of the body that bridge the mind and the world.

Gesture is a powerful tool for learning. Gestures reflect a learner’s knowledge and also have the power to change that knowledge. But how early does this ability develop and how might it change over time? Here we discuss the effects of gesture on learning, taking a developmental perspective. We compare how young learners benefit from gesture prior to developing full language skills, as well as how gesture and language work together to support instruction in older children. For both developmental stages, we explore three ways in which gesture can influence learning: (1) by indexing or reflecting a learner’s knowledge, (2) by changing that knowledge through the gestures that learners themselves produce, and (3) by changing that knowledge through the gestures that learners see. Taken together, the evidence suggests that gesture plays a powerful role in learning and education throughout development.

Gestures of the face have a relatively limited presence in scholarly gesture discourses. The use of facial movements as intentional communication has been historically undermined in facial behavior research. The face has been primarily studied as expressions of emotion, traditionally theorized as involuntary signs of internal affective states. Emotion expressions are differentiated from facial movements that serve conversational functions in face-to-face dialogue. The facial gestures presented in this chapter illustrate the flexibility and diversity of meanings conveyed by facial communicative actions. Gestures can refer to affective events not present in the immediate here and now, communicate understanding of another individual’s affective experience, and convey information about a target referent. Other facial gestures have counterparts in hand gestures with similar pragmatic and semantic functions. The study of facial gestural components of linguistic communicative events is important to the construction of a comprehensive model of language.

The chapters in the handbook cover five main topics. Gesture types in terms of forms and functions; the focus is on manual gestures and their use as emblems, recurrent gestures, pointing gestures, and iconic representational gestures, but attention is also given to facial gestures. Different methods by which gestures have been annotated and analyzed, and different theoretical and methodological approaches, including semiotic analysis. The relation of gesture to language use covers language evolution as well as first and second language acquisition. Gestures in relation to cognition, including an overview of McNeill’s growth point theory. Gestures in interaction, considering variation in gesture use and intersubjectivity. Across the chapters, the meaning of the term ‘gesture’ is itself debated, as is the relation of gesture to language (as multimodal communication or in terms of different semiotic systems). Gesture use is studied based on data from speakers of various languages and cultures, but there is a bias toward European cultures, which remains to be addressed. The handbook provides overviews of the work of some scholars which was previously not widely available in English.

The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.

Proposals that gesture played a pivotal role in the evolution of language have been highly influential. However, there are many differences between gestural origin theories, including different definitions of ‘gesture’ itself. We use a cognitive semiotic approach in order to categorize and review these theories. A semiotic system is a combination of signs or signals of particular type, defined by characteristic properties, and the interrelations between these signs/signals. Signal systems like spontaneous facial expressions and non-linguistic vocalizations are under less voluntary control than sign systems. The basic distinction relates to the question of whether gesture played an exclusive role in early stages of language evolution (monosemiotic theories), or whether other semiotic systems were involved as well: polysemiotic theories. The latter may be equipollent, where language and gesture are considered equally prominent from the onset, or pantomimic, where gesture played the main but not exclusive role in breaking from predominantly signal-based to sign-based communication. We conclude that pantomimic theories are the most promising kind.

Geneviève Calbris’ semiotic study of French gestures began in the 1970s and shows how gestural signs interface between the concrete and the abstract. Created by analogical links originating in physical experience of the world via processes of mimesis and metonymy, they are activated by contexts of use and constitute diverse semantic constructions: Gesture is able to evoke several notions alternatively (polysemy) or simultaneously (polysign). As expressions of perceptual schemas extracted from physical experience, they prefigure concepts. A Saussurean perspective brings to light relations between physical features of gestures (signifiers) and the notions (signifieds) they are apt to evoke; it reveals signifiers that are common to different gestures (paradigmatic axis of substitution) and how signifiers interweave in gestural sequencing (syntagmatic axis of combination). Gesture expresses, animates, explains, synthesizes information, and anticipates speech. We highlight its utterance functions, its simultaneous multireferentiality, the gestural anticipation of verbal information, and the interplay of tension-relaxation between conversation partners that this can create.

Face-to-face dialogue and the cospeech gestures that occur within it are social as well as cognitive. Cospeech gestures are microsocial. Some of these gestures provide information that directly advances the topic of a dialogue. Others inform addressee about the state of the dialogue at that moment. Efron distinguished between objective and logical-discursive gestures. McNeill distinguished between propositional gestures and beats. Bavelas et al. distinguished between topical and interactive functions of gestures. Gerwing documented changes in form that marked gestures that were part of common ground. Seyfeddinipur identified discursive and meta-discursive gestures. Kendon described a variety of social, pragmatic gestures. Holler and Wilkin showed that mimicking a gesture conveyed understanding of that gesture. Galati and Brennan noted metanarrative functions of gestures. Kok et al. separated semantic and metacommunicative gestures. We focus on Clark’s distinction between track 1 and track 2 functions in dialogue. Track 1 conveys the basic communicative acts (i.e. topical content) whereas track 2 conveys the metacommunicative acts that ensure successful communication.

This chapter presents an overview of the field of second/foreign language acquisition (SLA) and gesture, which examines gestures as a window onto language acquisition, and gestures as a medium of acquisition. The chapter surveys what is known about effects of specific languages in contact (crosslinguistic influence), general learner behaviors, teachers’ and learners’ gesture practices in and outside of language classrooms, and effects of seeing and producing gestures on language learning. The chapter closes with a research agenda for SLA and gesture studies, outlining some open questions, challenges, and future research topics.

In situations ranging from border control to policing and welfare, governments are using automated facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect taxes, prevent crime, police cities, and control immigration. FRT involves the processing of a person’s facial image, usually for identification, categorisation, or counting. This ambitious handbook brings together a diverse group of legal, computer, communications, and social and political science scholars to shed light on how FRT has been developed, used by public authorities, and regulated in different jurisdictions across five continents. Informed by their experiences working on FRT across the globe, chapter authors analyse the increasing deployment of FRT in public and private life. The collection argues for the passage of new laws, rules, frameworks, and approaches to prevent harms of FRT in the modern state and advances the debate on scrutiny of power and accountability of public authorities which use FRT. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter analyses the legal framework for the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in the public sector in Germany, with a particular emphasis on the pertinent German data protection and police laws. Under German law, a legal basis is required for these real-world applications of FRT. The article discusses whether the pertinent laws provide such legal basis and what limits they impose.

This chapter introduces the reader to facial recognition technology (FRT) history and the development of FRT from the perspective of science and technologies studies. Beginning with the traditionally accepted origins of FRT in 1964–1965, developed by Woody Bledsoe, Charles Bisson, and Helen Wolf Chan in the United States, Simon Taylor discusses how FRT builds on earlier applications in mug shot profiling, imaging, biometrics, and statistical categorisation. Grounded in the history of science and technology, the chapter demonstrates how critical aspects of FRT infrastructure are aided by scientific and cultural innovations from different times of locations: that is, mugshots in eighteenth-century France; mathematical analysis of caste in nineteenth-century British India; innovations by Chinese closed-circuit television companies and computer vision start-ups conducting bio-security experiments on farm animals. This helps to understand FRT development beyond the United States-centred narrative. The aim is to deconstruct historical data, mathematical, and digital materials that act as ‘back-stage elements’ to FRT and are not so easily located in infrastructure yet continue to shape uses today. Taylor’s analysis lays a foundation for the kinds of frameworks that can better help regulate and govern FRT as a means for power over populations in the following chapters.

With technological implementations becoming more and more intrusive and with laws challenged by rapid technology developments, European citizens have become particularly vulnerable to un(der)-regulated biometric surveillance practices. Despite promising regulatory initiatives, there appears to be an acute social need for concrete rules to ban, halt, sanction, or frame specific practices that interfere with fundamental human rights, including the right to privacy and personal data protection. This chapter argues that the global reach, global risk, or possible global harm of contemporary biometric surveillance practices can be adequately addressed by concrete law-making and uniform enforcement with a view to jointly scrutinising and, where needed, jointly banning, halting, or sanctioning specific technological uses.

Police use of facial recognition technologies is on the rise across Europe and beyond. Public authorities state that these powerful algorithmic systems could play a major role in assisting to prevent terrorism, reduce crime, and to safeguard vulnerable persons. There is also an international consensus that these systems pose serious risks to the rule of law and several human rights, including the right to private life, as guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The world’s first case examining the legality of a facial recognition system deployed by police, Bridges v South Wales Police, thus remains an important precedent for policymakers, courts, and scholars worldwide. This chapter focusses on the role and influence of the right to private life, as enshrined in Article 8 ECHR, and the relevant case law of the European Court of Human Rights, in the ‘lawfulness’ assessment of the police use of live facial recognition in Bridges. A framework that the Court of Appeal for England and Wales held was ‘not in accordance with the law’ and therefore in breach of Article 8 ECHR. The analysis also considers the emerging policy discourse prompted by Bridges in the United Kingdom surrounding the need for new legislation, a significant shift away from the current AI governance approach of combining new ethical standards with existing law.

Facial recognition technology (FRT) has been actively deployed by both private and public sectors for a wide range of purposes in China. As the technology has become more prevalent, the laws governing FRT have developed rapidly in recent years. While the use of FRT is increasingly regulated in the country, the regulatory restrictions can be invariably lifted for the reason of public security. Government agencies have consistently claimed this regulatory exemption for their massive FRT deployment. Moreover, the liability for government’s abuse or misuse of personal data is relatively insignificant when compared with that for private parties. Based on recent laws and cases, this chapter explains China’s asymmetric regulatory framework and the factors shaping it.

Almost forty Brazilian cities have begun to deploy facial recognition technology (FRT) in a bid to automate the public safety, transportation, and border control sectors. Such initiatives are frequently introduced in the context of ‘Smart City’ programmes, which exist in a sort of legislative vacuum. Despite the numerous bills recently discussed in the Brazilian Parliament, there is still no legislation that addresses artificial intelligence in general or FRT use specifically. Only minimal and incomplete guidance can be found in general frameworks and sectoral legislation, such as the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD), the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, the Civil Code, and even the Federal Constitution. This chapter provides an overview of the current status of FRT regulation in Brazil, highlighting the existing deficiencies and risks. It discusses whether LGPD rules allowing the use of FRT for public safety, national defence, state security, investigative activities, and the repression of criminal activities are reasonable and justified.