Gestural Grammar: Investigating Gestures in Southern Italy (GestuGram)

Project title:

Name(s) of staff/team involved

Dr Valentina Colasanti

Short 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. As a matter of fact, scholars interested in language from different perspectives (e.g. psychologists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, etc.) mostly agree that gesture and speech should both be taken into account while studying language because both convey semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information. Within theoretical linguistics, only formal semanticists have taken the study of gesture seriously up to now. Formal syntax, on the other hand, has to this point mostly neglected gesture, despite the interesting questions it poses for syntactic theory. Drawing from the gesture-heavy languages of southern Italy, this project, led by P.I. Dr Valentina Colasanti, aims to address the gap in the literature by developing a grammar of gesture.

Link to main project:https://valentinacolasanti.it/gestugram/

Gestural fieldwork in Southern Italy: methodological considerations and challenges

Project title: Gestural fieldwork in Southern Italy: methodological considerations and challenges

Name(s) of staff/team involved: Dr Valentina Colasanti

Short description: This project is embedded in Dr Valentina Colasanti’s research project Gestural Grammar: Investigating gestures in Southern Italy, which aims to study the grammatical contribution of gestures in the endangered languages spoken in Southern Italy. The AHSS Benefactions award will allow Dr Colasanti and her international team based at Trinity College Dublin to conduct fieldwork on gestures in the Italian peninsula. In particular, the award will enable her team to gather linguistic data using new elicitation techniques and methodologies tailored specifically to the investigation of gestures in the complex speech communities present in Italy, where most individuals have access to at least three distinct grammars (i.e., they are multilingual).

This project is funded by the Arts and Social Sciences Benefactions Fund Award awarded by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity College Dublin.

Link to main project: https://valentinacolasanti.it/gestugram/