In examining examples of utterances in which speech and gesture are employed together, we have seen how the gesture phrases commence in advance of the words to which their strokes appear to be connected semantically. We suggest that this is best accounted for by supposing that it is only in this way that the strokes of the gesture phrases can be produced so that they are coordinate with what is expressed with the semantic nuclei of the co-occurring spoken phrases. This semantic coherence (or ‘co-expressiveness’ as McNeill has called it) of gesture phrase stroke with spoken expression is evidence that the gestural component and the spoken component of an utterance are produced under the guidance of a single plan. We suggest, however, that the conjunction of the stroke with the informational centre of the spoken phrase is something that the speaker achieves. In creating an utterance that uses both modes of expression, the speaker creates an ensemble in which gesture and speech are employed together as partners in a single rhetorical enterprise.

Consider again Example 1 and Example 2 from Chapter 7. In both the speaker introduces a pause in the speech which appears to be related to the process of organizing the gestural component. In Example 1 the speaker paused for a moment after he had finished pronouncing the word that was semantically coordinate with the stroke, so that the two-part stroke could be completed before he went on to the next words of the spoken component.