The Anatomy of Meaning

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Review of the hardback: '... extraordinarily interesting book ... it is a virtue of Enfield's book that, through its clarity and explicitness, it opens these differences in viewpoint up for debate. This is one reason why the impact of The Anatomy of Meaning will go beyond the value of its empirical findings and the contributions to the workings of gesture that it makes.' Pragmatics and Cognition Review of the hardback: '... an extremely thought-provoking and valuable contribution to the recent cross-disciplinary trend of research on the cognitive and pragmatic conditions for human interaction.' Geoffrey Gowlland, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Review of the hardback: 'Enfield's The Anatomy of Meaning is a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video-recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion of 'composites', through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration - how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote a kind of cross-modal orderliness, or the achievement of orderliness - perhaps through heuristics and inference-making? ... [The] Anatomy of Meaning is, simply put, in the vanguard of the science of communication. It deserves wide attention.' Michael Lempert, Language in Society