The study of non-verbal communication and gesture has recently seen a rise of interest, within several different research fields, as applied to sociological, cognitive, communication and anthropological studies. The present talk will provide a brief inter-disciplinary introduction to the major questions still debated and then turn to focus on the role of emotions, expressions, and gesture within communicative acts. Basic phenomena available from field research will be discussed, and an analysis will be applied within a number of possible contexts, including learning , second language acquisition in children, evolutionary perspectives of language, and subsequent applications in artificial intelligence.