This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘A hand-y guide to gesture. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book about gesture, including why we gesture and how linguists do research on it. But first, I have a little story to tell.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: A little while ago, I was in a very cool café/restaurant/pub type place, and I went to the bathroom. The bathroom had a bunch of fun stickers and art and graffiti on the walls. There were some stickers for podcasts. I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool! I should add a Lingthusiasm sticker. Maybe people who come to this cool bar would like our cool podcast.” But then I realised, we don’t actually have a sticker or version of our logo that actually says that we’re a podcast.

Lauren: Oh, good point.

Gretchen: Like, our logo just says “Lingthusiasm,” which is great if you are like, “Ooo, ‘linguistics’ plus ‘enthusiasm.’ That sounds like it might be neat,” but not if you wanna stick it somewhere that indicates, “Here’s what you might want to get into this for.”

Lauren: Sure. It would be nice if it did say something like, “We’re a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.”

Gretchen: We have a great tagline. It should actually go on a sticker. But with the way our logo is currently formatted, there’s not an obvious spot to put that.

Lauren: I also realised we maybe have a bit of a design issue when a family member put one of the show stickers up and very sensibly had the word “Lingthusiasm” along the bottom.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen this happen to people, too. I give them stickers, and if they haven’t listened to the show before, they will very naturally put the text reading from left to right like text normally reads in English rather than up the side like we did maybe too cleverly.

Lauren: Yeah, I think we were too clever for our own good, especially if people are only passingly familiar with the show and/or the logo.

Gretchen: This inspired us – we’ve given out a lot of logo stickers at conferences; people like them. What if we came up with a slight variation on the existing design that was a little bit more clear about some of these factors?

Lauren: Our artist, Lucy, has been making all of these really nice doodle designs that are on own website and social media, but they aren’t reflected in the logo at all.

Gretchen: We asked Lucy if she could draw us some fun little objects, like we have elsewhere on the website, but in the shape of the classic Lingthusiasm squiggle-slash-glottal-stop-slash-question-mark-slash-ear logo. She could fill them in with some references from the past 100 episodes and other linguistics objects of assorted kinds.

Lauren: I am biased, but I love the little kiki and the little bouba in there.

Gretchen: I thought you were gonna comment on all the hand shapes.

Lauren: I also love those.

Gretchen: I personally love the leaping rabbit because rabbits have come up several times on Lingthusiasm with Gavagai and the Bill Labov rabbit story.

Lauren: I’m upset that you didn’t say you love the teeny tiny silhouettes of us having a little chat together.

Gretchen: Those are also very charming.

Lauren: We’ll have a link in the show notes to where you can see it and see what tiny objects you recognise from past episodes.

Gretchen: Plus, if you want to have the sticker in your own hands to put on your own water bottle or your laptop or maybe inside the bathrooms of your favourite spot that’s cool with having stickers in bathrooms, or assorted other locations, I dunno, telephone poles, we’re also gonna send a copy of the sticker with this new design on it to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-thusiast level or higher on our Patreon as of July 1, 2025.

Keep reading

103: A hand-y guide to gesture

Gestures: every known language has them, and there’s a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out “coloured garden relax chair” that makes people “um” more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen’s gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).

There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn’t fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We’ll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you’d like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation…stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky’s assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we’ve read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Gesture: A Slim Guide’ by Lauren Gawne
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Emoji are Gesture Because Internet’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge’
• 'Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production’ by Rauscher et al.
• 'Effects of Visual Accessibility and Hand Restraint on Fluency of Gesticulator and Effectiveness of Message’ by Karen P. Lickiss and A. Rodney Wellens
• 'Effects of relative immobilization on the speaker’s nonverbal behavior and on the dialogue imagery level’ by Rimé et al.
• 'The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance’ by J. A. Graham and S. Heywood

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Episode 84: Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!

Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you’re pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can’t. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of ways of pointing, and their relative prominence varies across cultures: you can point to something with a finger or two, with your whole hand, with your elbow, your head, your eyes and eyebrows, your lips, and even your words.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about pointing, aka deixis. We talk about how pointing varies across cultures and species: English speakers tend to have a taboo against pointing with the middle finger and to some extent at people, but don’t have the very common cross-cultural taboo against pointing at rainbows. We also talk about the technical term for pointing in a linguistic context, deixis, and how deictic meanings bring together a whole bunch of categories: pronouns in signed and spoken languages, words like here, this, go, and today, and the eternal confusion about which Tuesday is next Tuesday.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

This episode is brought to you by all of the fantastic people who have supported the podcast by becoming patrons or buying merch over the years! We say this a lot but it really is very much the case that we would have had to give up making the show a long time ago without your financial support. If you would like to help keep the show running ad-free into the future, listen to bonus episodes, and connect with other language nerds on our Discord, join us on Patreon.

In this month’s bonus episode, Lauren gets enthusiastic about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork with Dr. Martha Tsutsui Billins, an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at California State University Fresno and creator of the podcast Field Notes, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Why don’t apes point?’ - Michael Tomasellso
• 'Dogs’ responsiveness to human pointing gestures’ - K. Soproni, A. Miklósi, J. Topál, V. Csányi
• 'A Comparative Study of the Use of Visual Communicative Signals in Interactions Between Dogs and Humans and Cats and Humans’ - Á. Miklósi, P. Pongrácz, G. Lakatos, J. Topál, V. Csányi.
• 'The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• Discussion of lip pointing in 'Encanto’ on Reddit, including video example
• 'Body-directed gestures: Pointing to the self and beyond’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• 'Even Rainbows Have a Dark Side’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• Etymonline entry for ’*deik-’
• Etymonline entry for 'deixis’
• Wikipedia entry for 'deixis’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns: Little words, big jobs’
• 'Pointing in gesture and sign’ - Kensy Cooperrider & Kate Mesh
• 'How Pointing is Integrated into Language: Evidence From Speakers and Signers’ - K. Cooperrider, J. Fenlon, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
• 'Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing’ - J. Fenlon, K. Cooperrider, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
• 'On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American sign language’ - Laura A. Petitto
• 'Demonstratives and deixis in Tamil and Sinhala’ blog post on Xavieremmanuel.org
• 'Spatial deixis in Iaai (Loyalty Islands)’ - Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre
• 'Deictic categories in three languages of Eastern Indonesia’ - Hein Steinhauer
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 36: Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Watch the episode here, or listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 36 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr Lynn Hou, who’s an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a signer of American Sign Language. But first, it’s thanks to our patrons that we’re able to expand the podcast into interesting new formats like this video episode about signed languages, which is one of our most-requested topics. To become a patron, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello! Lina, welcome!

Lina: Hello. Happy to be here.

Gretchen: It’s so nice to have you on the show. This is a question that we start with all of our guests, how did you get into linguistics?

Lina: Oh, that’s a fascinating story, if I do say so myself. Well, my parents are from Taiwan. When I was about 7, or perhaps 6, it was the first international trip that my parents had brought me on. We went to Taiwan. They are from Taipei, which is the capital of Taiwan. I thought, well, I knew d/Deaf people were in the United States and they had their own sign language, that being American Sign Language, or ASL, but my trip was the first time that I had actually witnessed another sign language. My mom went to a deaf institution [school for the deaf] there and we saw sign language. It was a sign language that wasn’t quite mine. It was Taiwan Sign Language. Something was quite different, and I didn’t understand what they were saying. The d/Deaf people were signing, and I was quite fascinated. 

At that moment, I began to realise there are different signed languages in different countries. I began to think, “Hmm, maybe that’s something I wanna do later.” I began studying various signed languages. The problem is that you can’t go into a library or a particular place and look at a grammar that has been published. You have many users and speakers of that language. When I got into linguistics, I began to study the language. With sign language though, it’s almost impossible to go into a place like that. I happened to meet various d/Deaf people in different countries, and that was really exciting. I thought, “Where do I meet them and what do I do?” It’s something that I kept in my mind, in the back of my mind, until I was an adult. Then, I had the opportunity to travel the world and meet various d/Deaf people.

Keep reading

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Excerpt from Episode 2 of Lingthusiasm: Pronouns. Little words, big jobs. Listen to the full episode, read the transcript, or check out the show notes for links to further reading.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.