GestuGram work

The syntactisation of gestures

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina, and Craig Sailor. 2025. Some formal properties of gestural polar response markers, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, 4 September 2025, University of Suffolk, UK.

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina, Grosso, Lisanna, and Donna Jo Napoli. Articulatory properties of emblems in Italo-Romance and signs in Italian Sign Language, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, 4 September 2025, University of Suffolk, UK.

Workshop talk. Colasanti, Valentina, and Craig Sailor. 2025. Some formal properties of gestural polar response markers, Trinity Forum on Formal Linguistics, 28 February 2025, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

Invited seminar talk. Colasanti, Valentina. The grammatical contribution of gestures: a research programme, GLif (Formal Linguistics Research Group) Seminars, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, 12 December 2024.

Invited workshop talk. Colasanti, Valentina. Dimensions of meanings in co-speech gestures, workshop on Linguistic multi-dimensionality, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, 13 December 2024.

Invited keynote talk. Colasanti, Valentina. The syntacticisation of gestures. The contribution of the Romance languages of Italy, 18 Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology meeting, University of Manchester, UK, June 2024.

Syntactically-integrated gestures in Italo-Romance
    • Mano a borsa ‘pursed hand’     

Peer-reviewed journal article. Colasanti, Valentina. Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8(1), 1–45, 2023. DOI: https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/9743/

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina.  Syntactically-integrated gestures in Southern Italy. Going Romance 35, University of Amsterdam, 1-3 December 2021, online.

Invited seminar talk. Colasanti, Valentina. Linguistically-integrated gestures: a case study from the languages of Southern Italy, SyntaxLab, 19 October 2021, online.

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina.  Linguistically-integrated co-speech gestures in Southern Italo-Romance, 15th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting, University of Helsinki, 8-10 September 2021, online.

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina.  Linguistically-integrated gestures: a case study from the languages of Southern Italy, Annual Meeting of the LAGB, 6-9 September 2021, online.

Invited seminar talk. Colasanti, Valentina. Syntactically-integrated co-speech gestures: some preliminary evidence from the languages of Southern Italy, SuperLing Colloquium, University of Oslo, 4 June 2021, online.

    • Ring-focus   

Peer-reviewed journal article.  Colasanti, Valentina. Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance, Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 9/(4)/5, 1-39, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.296

Conference talk.  Colasanti, Valentina, and Clara Cuonzo. Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance. Talk given at Romance Languages: Recent Contributions to Linguistic Theory, Harvard University, 28-29 April 2022 (with Clara Cuonzo).

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina, and Clara Cuonzo.  Gestural focus marking. Talk to be given at PerForum. Forum on Performativity in Language and Beyond, University of Oslo, 3 June 2022.

    • Open Hand Prone

Invited seminar talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. 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.

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. 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.

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. 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, Lecce, Italy.

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. A gestural epistemic marker in Neapolitan: A first look. Poster presentation at the 38th Going Romance, Universidade do Minho, Braga, 6th December 2024.

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. 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.

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. 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.

  • Finger Bunch Open Hand 

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina and Chiara Marchetiello.  Gestural topic marking in Romance, at IRAAL 2025, Trinity College Dublin, 20-21 November 2025.

Peer-reviewed journal article.  Colasanti, Valentina and Chiara Marchetiello. Gesture and information structure: a case study on topic markers in Southern Italo-Romance. Italian Journal of Linguistics. 2025, accepted.

  • Chin flick     

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. Gestures of negation: true or false?, Formal Approaches to Language MultiModality, 4-5 December 2025, Trinity College Dublin.

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. Parasitic licensing in the visual-gestural modality, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, 4 September 2025, University of Suffolk, UK.

Conference talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. A Gestural Negative Polarity Item in Italo-Romance, Comparative Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting, University of Chieti‒Pescara (8‒10 September 2025), Pescara, Italy.

Workshop talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. Parasitic NPI licensing in the visual-gestural modality, Trinity Forum on Formal Linguistics, 28 February 2025, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

  • Head nod and Head shake

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina, and Craig Sailor. 2025. Some formal properties of gestural polar response markers, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, 4 September 2025, University of Suffolk, UK.

  • Gesture in self-talk

Conference talk. Colasanti, Valentina, and Martina Wiltschko. Gesture in self-talk, Formal Approaches to Language MultiModality, 4-5 December 2025, Trinity College Dublin.

Gestural fieldwork

Conference talk.  Colasanti, Valentina. Gestural fieldwork: a case study from Southern Italy. Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 6, SOAS London, 16-18 December 2021, online.

Invited seminar talk.  Colasanti, Valentina. Investigating gestures in Southern Italy: some methodological considerations, Linguistics Research Seminars, Trinity College Dublin, 10 November 2021, online.

Gesture and ellipsis (joint project with Craig Sailor)

Invited seminar talk. Sailor, Craig, and Valentina Colasanti. Are syntax and semantics modality-blind? Testing Esipova’s Conjecture with ellipsis, CASTL FishFeed, UiT, 28 February 2020 (with Craig Sailor).

Conference talk. Sailor, Craig, and Valentina Colasanti. Co-speech gestures under ellipsis: a first look, Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, 2-5 January 2020, New Orleans, USA (with Craig Sailor).

Dissertations

PhD dissertation. Marchetiello, Chiara. In progress. The Syntax of Gestures in the Local Languages of Campania. PhD Dissertation, Trinity College Dublin.

PhD dissertation. Spadi, Bruno. 2025. Clitic distribution and verb movement in the languages of Sicily. PhD Dissertation, Trinity College Dublin.

General audience talks on gestures in Italy

Talk. Marchetiello, Chiara. 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, 21st June 2024.

Talk. Colasanti, Valentina.  Gesture, language, and the languages of Italy, Exploring Research and Research Careers, European Researchers’ Night, Start Talking About Research Today 2020 (START 2020), Trinity College Dublin, online event.