Gesture and speech rephrasings in conversation

In conversation it is common for participants to take up and repeat or rephrase in various ways what their partners say. Through the analysis of some extracts of conversations recorded on video, this paper shows that speakers can rephrase their partners’ gestures as well as their words. The focus is on the operations that the speakers (the “recipients” in the study) perform upon their partners’ speech and gesture, and in particular, on the positioning of the gesture relative to the verbal item in the new utterance. The study suggests that speakers can treat gesture and speech as a whole or as independent materials that can be separated or fused to form new language units.