"This book constitutes a very welcome challenge to the traditional emphasis on the differences between signed and spoken language use (which has unfortunately obscured many similarities), and enables Shaw to address a wide range of topical questions of interest to scholars of linguistics, anthropology, and gesture studies...Shaw's demonstration of how we can compare deaf and hearing interactions is the greatest strength of the book."
— Gabrielle Hodge, Journal of Pragmatics
"Shaw makes a significant contribution to defining the role of gesture from the perspective of multimodality, semiotics, interaction and embodiment. For me, as a Deaf academic, a sign language user and a member of the sign language community, Shaw’s research is more than welcome...(and) is an icebreaker in an important way."
— Juhana Salonen, Multimodal Communication
"I am quite optimistic about the perspective on embodied discourse that Shaw provides in Gesture in Multiparty Interaction ... Shaw’s approach, which moves beyond the gesture-sign dichotomy to instead focus on the functions of composite utterances in situated discourse, presents a compelling and encouraging solution for integrating these two fields in a theoretically satisfying way. Along the way, Shaw’s detailed analysis of instances of naturalistic discourse, though challenging to condense into bite-sized portions for the purposes of writing a review, richly illustrate these complex theoretical notions, making them accessible to new audiences."
— Ryan Lepic, Sign Language and Linguistics
"Shaw presses us, as sociolinguists, to think of co-speech and talk as symbiotic, mutually elaborating dimensions of the same thing: language."
— Emily Kuret, Language in Society