Repetitions in Gesture : A Cognitive Linguistic and Usage Based Perspective 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