The rise of gesture studies as its own field of inquiry has had a number of spin-off effects. For the field of linguistics, the implications have been both methodological and theoretical. Cognitive linguists initially fulfilled their claims to a usage-based approach through analyses of written corpora. What new questions of language use do we confront with the turn to digital video data and concomitant methods of movement analysis? While sign language linguists made many breakthroughs in this regard, what is different methodologically about researchers of spoken languages not only hearing but also looking closely at speakers as moving communicators?
The gestural turn has also raised a number of theoretical questions. Some of these have arisen in the analysis of specific linguistic phenomena, as in the discovery of gestural correlates of the lexico-grammatical expression of motion events, or in findings concerning gestural movement qualities relating to aspectual forms used to describe different kinds of events. Some have helped turn a spotlight on phenomena that previously received less attention in linguistics, such as issues connected with the expression of viewpoint, or with the role of imagery as it relates to linguistic semantics in connection with mental simulation. Others have to do with different theorizing about the nature of language itself. In my own work, this has meant a shift from thinking about language as multimodal to analyzing it as one semiotic system that is part of polysemiotic communication (as per Zlatev, 2018).
It is worth noting that the ways that the field of gesture studies is moving linguistics ahead actually involve a return to some earlier views. Rather than thinking of language as an entity having an ‘architecture’, or as a formal system based on symbolic logic, the analysis of gesturing speakers puts the focus on language as an embodied experience—something which keeps us in touch with the human nature of our research.