2026-04-17T07:41:53Zhttps://recercat.cat/oai/request

oai:recercat.cat:2072/4720672025-07-29T22:21:22Zcom_2072_98col_2072_378192

00925njm 22002777a 4500 dc Colasanti, Valentina author 2023 Acknowledgements. This research has been funded by the the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute within the research project Gestural Grammar: Investigating Gestures in Southern Italy (GestuGram; PI: Colasanti). Gesture has been a topic of recent interest in formal linguistics, especially with respectto its pragmatic and semantic properties (Lascarides & Stone 2009a,b; Ebert & Ebert2014; Schlenker 2018; Esipova 2019a). There is emerging consensus within this literaturethat the meaning of certain gestures is integrated into the semantic content of the utter-ances they co-occur with (as co-speech gestures). This would follow straightforwardly ifsuch gestures were in fact morphemes, meaning they have syntactic status as well (Jouit-teau 2004, 2007; Sailor & Colasanti 2020). This paper provides additional support forthis hypothesis, involving the conventionalised co-speech gesture RING-FOCUS (Kendon1995:268-274) in Lancianese, a southern Italo-Romance language. On the basis of origi-nal experimental fieldwork, I argue that RING-FOCUS is a gestural morpheme associatedwith information-structural focus: it arises in focus contexts, temporally aligned with thefocalised constituent. I argue that the RING-FOCUS morpheme is simply a focus marker(of the sort found in Gungbe, Malay, etc.), albeit one whose PF realisation happens to begestural rather than spoken. Super Linguistics Italo-Romance Gesture Focus markers Syntax Visual-gestural modality Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance