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David McNeill, Language is gesture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025. Pp. 240. Pb. $45. eBook open access.

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David McNeill, Language is gesture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025. Pp. 240. Pb. $45. eBook open access.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2026

Anna Palmann Open the ORCID record for Anna Palmann [Opens in a new window]
Anna Palmann*
Affiliation:
Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, XH, The Netherlands
*
Email: a.palmann@uva.nl
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Book Notes
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Language in Society , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , September 2026 , pp. 795 - 796
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Language is gesture is the most recent volume of a series of gesture books written by David McNeill, in which, starting in 1992, the renowned gesture researcher has been presenting and developing his ideas on the interplay of language, gesture, and thought.

In this book, McNeill takes an enactivist stance to demonstrate that language and gesture are part of one unified, dynamic system. Drawing from, and combining various psycholinguistic, Gestalt psychological, and phenomenological theories from authors such as William James, Wilhelm Wundt, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the author introduces the concept of growth points. He demonstrates a new understanding of language and gesture and the way in which they combine to a momentary state of a speaker’s context-embedded being, which can be represented through language. In discourse, this process is characterized and structured by so-called ‘catchments’, discourse segments with a shared gesture-speech unity from which growth points draw information as they dynamically form.

Throughout the book, the growth point theory is backed by findings from a large pool of language development research focusing both on spoken language and gesture separately, as well as on their interplay. The author identifies three different types or developmental phases of acquisition: acquisition 1, which is speech for attachment; acquisition 2, which is pantomime language; and acquisition 3—the most crucial one—which is gesture-speech unity. In this last stage, the thought-language-hand-brain link is fully developed, and language as we know it can develop.

The author further brings evidence from various (published and unpublished) gesture studies of colleagues and of his own, and finishes with evidence from neuroscience, especially also from studies with clinical populations like aphasia or split-brain patients, taking a short excursion to primate research.

As the title suggests, Language is gesture is a manifesto for the necessary interconnectedness of spoken language and gesture, making a strong point for their co-dependence and more generally the dynamic, emergent, and context-shaped nature of cognition and language, which is characterized by momentary states of being.