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.
Seminar and Conference talks (peer-reviewed abstracts)
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. A Gestural Negative Polarity Item in Italo-Romance, Comparative Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting, University of Chieti‒Pescara (8‒10 September 2025), Pescara, Italy.
2025. Parasitic NPI licensing in the visual-gestural modality, Trinity Forum on Formal Linguistics, 28 February 2025, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
2025. Some initial thoughts on the syntax of gestures in the languages of Campania. Talk to be given at the Romance Linguistics Circle (RoLinC), University of Cambridge, 11 March 2025.
2025. Il contributo morfosintattico dei gesti in Campania tra negazione ed epistemicità. Talk to be given at the XXXI Congresso internazionale di linguistica e di filologia romanza (CILFR), University of Salento, 30 June – 5 July, 2025.
2024. A gestural epistemic marker in Neapolitan: A first look. Poster presentation at the 38th Going Romance, Universidade do Minho, Braga, 6 December 2024.
2024. A gestural epistemic marker in Neapolitan: A first look. Poster presentation at the 6th Crete Summer School of Linguistics, University of Crete, 18th July 2024.
2024. Open Hand Prone gesture as epistemic marker in Neapolitan: A first look. Talk given at the 18th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting, University of Manchester, 25-27 June 2024.
2024. The Syntax of Gestures in the Languages of Campania. Poster presentation at the Early Career Researcher Poster Showcase 2024, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, 21 June 2024.
2024. New insights on manco in Neapolitan at the syntax-semantics interface. Talk given at the Konstanz Linguistics Conference, University of Konstanz, 21-22 March 2024.
2023. From less to more: manco in Neapolitan at the syntax-semantics interface. Talk given at the Linguistics Research Seminars, Trinity College Dublin, 28 November 2023.
Publications (peer-reviewed)
accepted. Colasanti, Valentina and Chiara Marchetiello. Gesture and information structure: a case study on topic markers in Southern Italo-Romance. Italian Journal of Linguistics.
Marchetiello, C. In progress. The Syntax of Gestures in the Local Languages of Campania. PhD Dissertation, Trinity College Dublin.