Dia: dijous 12 de desembre del 2024
Hora: 12.00 h
Lloc: sala 52.701 (edifici Roc Boronat, Campus del Poblenou)

Resum:
It is undeniable that language is multimodal. When we engage in conversation, we use more than one modality or channel of expression: the spoken-auditory modality (for speech) and the visual-gestural modality (for gesture, but also sign). Linguists working in both non-formal (Müller 2018) and formal traditions have observed that certain gestures exhibit familiar linguistic properties, and are therefore amenable to analysis using the tools of linguistics. There is mounting evidence particularly within the formal semantics literature that some gestures behave like normal linguistic expressions in their ability to, for example, interact scopally with spoken content, project (or not) out of certain syntactic environments, introduce semantic alternatives under contrastive focus, be recovered under ellipsis, etc. (Lascarides and Stone 2009a,b; Ebert 2018; Schlenker 2018; Esipova 2019; i.a.). This has led some scholars to claim that such gestures are in fact morphemes (or List 1 items in the Distributed Morphology sense), meaning that they have syntactic status (Jouitteau 2004; Sailor and Colasanti 2020), and thus LF and PF status as well, just as non-gestural morphemes do. On this view, such gestures are run-of-the-mill feature bundles projected in the syntax, but which happen to get externalised gesturally rather than auditorily at PF. I refer to this view as the Grammatical Integration Hypothesis (Colasanti 2023a, 2023b, in progress).

This talk consists of two parts. The first part is programmatic: I explain why the Grammatical Integration Hypothesis ought to be tested, how to test it, and why the famously gesture-rich languages of Italy are the ideal testing-grounds. The second part of the talk is empirical: I present several case studies from Italo-Romance that constitute support for the Grammatical Integration Hypothesis, thus demonstrating the feasibility of this new research programme. Among the case studies I present, one shows that particular gestures are associated with the expression of marked information structure (e.g., topic and focus; Colasanti 2023b, Colasanti & Marchetiello forthcoming), while another shows that gestures can express other clause-level types of meaning (e.g. interrogative mood; Colasanti 2023a).