Abstract
During lectures, a variety of signs are produced while the teacher communicates very specific conceptual meanings to students. In this article, we focus on particular signs constituted by both words and gestures that comprise a dialectical, indivisible unit, that corresponds to a double signifier, verbal and visual at the same time. From an illustrative case extracted from a database with twenty-six videotaped biology lessons, we analyze the repetition of gestures (i.e., catchments [McNeill 2002]) within and across lessons dealing with the same conceptual topic, and elaborate it as a special case of sign iteration (Derrida 1988). In each iteration of the sign, the unit of gesture and word produces and reproduces the meaning of the signified and of themselves as signifiers.
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