Gradient at-issueness and semiotic complexity in gesture: a response

As the field of linguistics shifts toward a more embodied, multimodal understanding of language, we are given an opportunity to reconsider fundamental notions of what linguistic meaning is and how it works. Barnes and Ebert make an important contribution to this by using iconic expressions (hand gestures and ideophones) to problematize a simple, binary notion of at-issueness. I focus solely on the gesture portion of their analysis. I use this brief response to draw our attention to the tensions that arise between integrating co-speech gesture into our existing models and using gesture to reshape and reimagine those models.