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

Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance Colasanti, Valentina Super Linguistics Italo-Romance Gesture Focus markers Syntax Visual-gestural modality 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. 2023 Article ; Isogloss ; Vol. 9 Núm. 4 (2023), p. 1-39 open access Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/