Recurrent gestures are stabilized forms that embody a practical knowledge of dealing with different communicative, interactional, cognitive, and affective tasks. They are often derived from practical actions and engage in semantic and pragmatic meaning-making. They occupy a place between spontaneous (singular) gestures and emblems on a continuum of increasing stabilization. The chapter reconstructs the beginnings of research on recurrent gestures and illuminates different disciplinary perspectives that have explored processes of their emergence and stabilization, as well as facets of their communicative potential. The early days of recurrent-gesture research focused on the identification of single specimens and on the refinement of descriptive methods. In recent years, their role in self-individuation, their social role, and their relationship to signs of sign language have become a focus of interest. The chapter explores the individual, the linguistic, and the cultural side of recurrent gestures. Recurrent gestures are introduced as sedimented individual and social practices, as revealing the linguistic potential of gestures, and as a type that forms culturally shared repertoires.
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