Project Participants
Valentina Colasanti
(Associate Member)
Trinity College Dublin
Valentina.Colasanti@tcd.ie
Valentina Colasanti is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. Her research profile is situated within both theoretical linguistics and Romance linguistics (especially the Italo-Romance sub-family of languages). Most of her publications involve applying generative linguistic theory to syntactic and semantic phenomena from Italo-Romance.
In 2019, her interests broadened into the study of phenomena expressed within the visual modality, i.e. gesture. Such phenomena have been almost entirely overlooked in theoretical syntax and in Romance linguistics more generally. Her work in this area adopts a purely formal approach, drawing empirically from the gesture-rich languages of Southern Italy in particular. In 2020, she established the Gestural Grammar Lab (GestuGram Lab) at Trinity College Dublin after successfully competing for funding streams. She is currently directing the lab, which so far comprises two PhD students, one lab manager, five research assistants (postgraduate and undergraduate), and two fieldworkers.
Selected publications
- Colasanti, Valentina (2023). Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance, Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 9/(4)/5, 1-39. doi: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.296.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2023). Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1), 1–45. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9743.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2023). Auxiliary selection in Southern Lazio. Some implications for Romance microvariation and its limits, L’Italia dialettale, LXXXIV, 97–150.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2022). Micro-contact in Southern Italy: language change in Southern Lazio under pressure from Italian, Languages 2022, 7, 286. doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7040286.
- Colasanti, Valentina (2021). Criterial positions as diagnostics in Italo-Romance: some highs and lows. Revue roumaine de linguistique, LXVI, 2-3, 265–282.
- Colasanti, Valentina and Martina Wiltschko (2019). Spatial and discourse deixis and the speech act structure of nominals, Proceedings of the Canadian Linguistic Association Annual Meeting (CLA), 1-3 June 2019, Vancouver BC.
Chiara Marchetiello
(Associate Member)
The GestuGram Lab, Trinity College Dublin
marchtetc@tcd.ie
Chiara Marchetiello is a PhD student in Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. Her doctoral project The Syntax of Gestures in the Local Languages of Campania is funded by Trinity’s Provost’s PhD Project Award awarded to the research project Gestural Grammar: Investigating Gestures in Southern Italy (GestuGram) led by Prof Valentina Colasanti. Chiara’s dissertation aims to provide new insights on the grammatical integration of gestures using as empirical base the gestural inventories of the languages spoken in Campania region (e.g., Neapolitan, Torrese, Acerrano, etc.).
Chiara is primarily interested in theoretical syntax and its interfaces with semantics and phonology, with particular focus on Romance languages (especially the Italo-Romance subfamily of languages). Her research interests include negation and negative concord, the structure of nominals and vocatives, epistemic modality, and discourse markers.
Selected publications (seminar and conference talks, peer-reviewed abstracts)
- In press. Colasanti, Valentina and Chiara Marchetiello. Gesture and information structure: a case study on topic markers in Southern Italo-Romance. Italian Journal of Linguistics.
- 2025. Gestures of negation: True or false? Talk to be given at the Formal Linguistics Approaches to Multimodality (FLAMM), Trinity College Dublin, 4th December.
- 2025. Co-speech [PDO] is an epistemic gestural marker in Campania: end of discussion! Talk given at the Linguistics Research Seminars, Trinity College Dublin, 11 November 2025.
- 2025. Parasitic licensing in the visual-gestural modality, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, 4 September 2025, University of Suffolk, UK.
- 2025. Some initial thoughts on the syntax of gestures in the languages of Campania. Talk given at the Romance Linguistics Circle (RoLinC), University of Cambridge, 11 March 2025.
Project Description
Humans communicate using not only language, but the gestures that accompany it. Gestures are movements of the hands and body often paired with speech, and emerging research suggests that they are integrated with the grammar of language. Hence, the study of language is incomplete without the study of gesture. While gesture is universal, individual gestures vary across languages.
In recent years gestures have been a topic of much interest in formal linguistics, especially with respect to their semantic and pragmatic contribution (Ebert and Ebert 2014; Schlenker 2018; Esipova 2019). Since a consistent observation within this literature is that the semantic content of gestures can be integrated into the meaning of spoken utterances, one way to explain this semantic integration is to treat them as part of the grammar. Thus, in principle, gestures should be assumed to be able to contribute at different grammatical levels (e.g., syntactic, phonological, semantic).
For instance, the hypothesis by which gesture can participate in semantic relations because they can appear in syntactic representation has caught the attention of some scholars (Jouitteau 2004, Sailor and Colasanti 2020, Colasanti 2020, 2021, 2023a, 2023b, forthcoming). In particular, since gestures are performed with the same articulators as sign languages (e.g. hands, eyebrows), this would mean that, assuming a generative model of grammar, syntactic features are externalised at the PF interface as gesture (visual-gestural modality) rather than speech (auditory modality); i.e., syntax is modality-blind (see Esipova 2019; Sailor and Colasanti 2020).
Empirically drawing from the gesture-heavy languages spoken in southern Italy, GestuGram aims to develop a grammar of gesture.
This project is funded by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute (2020-23), HSE Ireland, FAHSS, and a Provost’s PhD Project Award (2021-25) funded by Trinity College Dublin.
Selected references
Colasanti, Valentina. 2023. Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance, Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 9/(4)/5, 1-39. doi: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.296.
Colasanti, Valentina. 2023. Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1), 1–45. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9743.
De Jorio, Andrea. 1832. La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano. Naples: Fibreno.
Ebert, Cornelia, and Christian Ebert. 2014. Gestures, demonstratives, and the attributive/referential distinction. Talk given at Semantics and Philosophy in Europe (SPE 7), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Esipova, Maria. 2019b. Composition and projection in speech and gesture. Doctoral Dissertation, NYU.
Sailor, Craig, and Valentina Colasanti. 2020. Co-speech gestures under ellipsis: a first look. Talk given at Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America, New Orleans, 2-5 January 2020 2020.
Schlenker, Philippe. 2018. Gesture projection and cosuppositions. Linguistics and Philosophy 41:295–365.