Gestures and Adaptive Niches: an Evolutionary Perspective on Co-speech Gestures

This proposal presents an evolutionary analysis of three types of co-speech gestures: symbolic emblems, indexical pointing gestures and iconic representational gesticulations. Synthesizing insights from a range of published sources in gestural studies, general linguistics and sign language linguistics, primate studies and analyses of biological evolution, these gestures are analyzed as evolved traits adapted to particular niches or roles within broader systems. Niche boundaries are comprised of an element’s distinct properties and functions, routes of learning and transmission and degrees of innateness and evolvability within populations. Rather than elements distributed along a flat productive-analytical continuum or as stages along diachronic pathways, these gestural traits are analyzed in terms of adaptive peaks and valleys with a landscape representing the broader system comprising human gesture and language. The same evolutionary processes are used to analyze gestures in speaking populations and the linguistic traits derived from gestures in signing populations. This approach offers new ways of approaching proposed linguistic universals and long-standing issues such as listability in sign languages, while offering a formal approach to gestures

Changing Culture : The Contribution of European Immigrants to New York City Literature, 1870–1940

This comprehensive look at the New York literature of European immigrants invites us to rethink in aesthetic terms the interaction between the psychic and the socio-historical. A closer look at the literary dimension of the Irish, German, Scandinavian and Dutch, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Greek, and other components of New York raises the question of the specificity whereby immigrant authors, or second-generation authors with a strong, obvious immigrant background, related to, and portrayed a city, and a city like no other such as New York. Mass immigration meant the almost perfect concentration in the New York of that period of the three classical dramatic unities of time, place and action, thus giving evidence to an epochal change that was at the same time external and internal, socio-political and existential, and whose effects are palpably present in the immigrants\u2019 literature. The massive global inflows from Castle Garden and Ellis Island happened because, and coincided with, a tumultuous industrial, economic and capitalist thrust, and caused a gigantic urban growth. To be sure, this was a phenomenon of obviously global dimensions, which concurred and vied with the aggressive nationalistic mind-set of the time and became an active element of a push and pull dynamic. Indeed, \u2018in a multitude of ways each immigrant culture articulated group identity as national identity\u2019

New and old Amsterdam in Twenty-First Century fiction

This chapter examines the evocation of New Amsterdam within contemporary novels of New York. You would think that, considering its humble, yet extraordinary beginnings as New Amsterdam, New York’s earliest history as a multicultural, multilingual Dutch settlement might have generated its own literature. However, this origin point is largely absent within American literary history. By assessing how New York’s Dutch origins have been featured in contemporary literature, this chapter examines Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Teju Cole’s Open City and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. These novels are examined for how New Amsterdam is set as the scene for New York’s present and its future