Underlying idiomatisation in the shift from gesture names to gesture idioms

The paper deals with gesture names and gesture idioms, analysing idiomatisation that occurs as the names become figurative units. Building explanatory models in line with seman-tic typology, the paper studies cases in Russian, English, French, and Spanish to find similari-ties and differences in semantic derivation of gesture names. The study owes its relevance to the significant involvement of gesture names and idioms in oral discourse, as it adds new data for explanatory models and semantic typology.