Repetitive sequences play a major role as a pattern-building device and are a basic syntagmatic
linguistic means on all language levels in spoken and signed languages. Little attention has
been paid to investigating them in multimodal language use. Do gestures exhibit different types
of repetitive sequences? Do they build complex units based on these types and if so how is the
pattern building to be described? How is the interrelation of gestural and spoken units in such
complex units? Is it possible to identify repetitive patterns that are comparable to spoken and
signed languages and or patterns specific to the gestural modality? Based on a corpus-analysis
of multimodal usage-events 7 chapters explore gestural repetitions with regard to their
structure semantic and syntactic relevance for multimodal utterances and cognitive saliency.
Fine-grained cognitive-linguistic analyses of multimodal usage events reveal that gestural
repetitions are not only a basic principle of building patterns in spoken and signed languages
but also in gestures. By addressing questions of mediality and multimodality of language-in-use
the book contributes to the investigation of repetition as a fundamental means of sign and
meaning construction (crosscutting modalities) and enhances the understanding of the multimodal
character of language in use.
