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The goal of this dissertation is to study the intrapersonal and symbolic function of gesture by a very specific type of population: hearing speakers of Spanish who, having been born to deaf parents, grew up developing a bimodal (Spanish and Spain’s Sign Language) linguistic interface, which borrows elements from the manual and spoken modalities. In the ordering of gestures devised by Kendon (1988) and cited by McNeill (1992), gesticulation and sign languages are placed at opposite ends of a continuum. At one end, gesticulation is formed by idiosyncratic spontaneous gestures lacking any conventional linguistic proprieties, which are produced in combination with speech in a global and synthetic semiosis. At the other end, sign languages are fully-fledged languages formed by conventionalized signs, which are produced in the absence of speech in a segmented and analytic semiosis. Some previous L2 studies (Brown and Gullberg, 2008; Choi and Lantolf, 2008; Negueruela, Lantolf, Jordan, and Gelabert, 2004; Stam, 2001) have addressed the relationship between speech and gestures in order to investigate whether second lan- guage speakers, even at advanced, near-native proficiency levels, shift their thinking- for-speaking patterns. Data in this study come from the spoken depiction of motion events (Talmy, 2000) of four bimodal participants and are compared with those of four Spanish unimodal counterparts. Data was gathered by video recording participants co-constructing and individually retelling a series of narratives in signing, oral and written modalities, although, the analysis for this study focuses almost exclusively on the oral modality, with some references to the signing when it is deemed appropriate. Results show how, in the construction of spoken narratives, bimodal participants display a particular sign-like gesticulation which, while co-occurring with speech, maintains linguistic properties and is, at least, partly conventionalized. Future re- search, whether in the general study of bimodalism or specifically in the confluence of Spanish and Spain’s Sign Language, will hopefully benefit from the initial insights outlined here.

Bu tez iktisat tarihinin uzun sure tartışılmış konularını Kurumsal İktisat'ın bakış açısıyla yeniden değerlendirmeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda teknoloji ve teknolojinin ekonomik ve sosyal hayat üzerindeki etkilerine dair farklı yaklaşımlar incelenip, kurumların tarihteki rolü ele alınmaktadır. Asıl Kurumsal İktisat ve Yeni Kurumsal İktisat olmak üzere iki akademik gelenek arasındaki farklılıklar vurgulanarak, iktisat tarihinin Endüstri Devrimi ve `Büyük Kopuş' gibi önemli gelişmelerininin kurumsal iktisadi yorumları tartışılmaktadır. İktisat tarihi çalışmalarına Yeni Kurumsal İktisatçıların tarihte teknolojinin rolüne dair görüşleri etkin bir biçimde dahil edilmişken, Asıl Kurumsal İktisat'ın olası katkıları büyük ölçüde keşfedilmeyi beklemektedir. Bu tezin esas amacı Asıl Kurumsal İktisat'ın teknoloji ile ilgili analizinin bu tartışmalar açısından önemini ve konuyla ilişkisini göstermektir. This thesis is an attempt to reassess the long debated issues of economic history from the perspective of institutional economics. Besides examining different approaches to technology and its impact on economic and social life, it analyzes the role of institutions in history. It discusses the institutional interpretations of the critical developments of economic history such as, the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence, with an emphasis on differences between the two scholarly traditions, namely, the Original Institutional Economics and the New Institutional Economics. Although the arguments of New Institutionalists concerning the role of technology in history have been effectively incorporated into the economic history research, the potential contributions of the Original Institutional Economics to the study of economic history have remained for the most part unexplored. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the relevance and importance of original institutional analysis with respect to technology and economic history. 160