Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance
Abstract
Gesture has been a topic of recent interest in formal linguistics, especially with respect
to its pragmatic and semantic properties (Lascarides & Stone 2009a,b; Ebert & Ebert
2014; Schlenker 2018; Esipova 2019a). There is emerging consensus within this literature
that the meaning of certain gestures is integrated into the semantic content of the utter-
ances they co-occur with (as co-speech gestures). This would follow straightforwardly if
such gestures were in fact morphemes, meaning they have syntactic status as well (Jouit-
teau 2004, 2007; Sailor & Colasanti 2020). This paper provides additional support for
this hypothesis, involving the conventionalised co-speech gesture RING-FOCUS (Kendon
1995:268–274) in Lancianese, a southern Italo-Romance language. On the basis of origi-
nal experimental fieldwork, I argue that RING-FOCUS is a gestural morpheme associated
with information-structural focus: it arises in focus contexts, temporally aligned with the
focalised constituent. I argue that the RING-FOCUS morpheme is simply a focus marker
(of the sort found in Gungbe, Malay, etc.), albeit one whose PF realisation happens to be
gestural rather than spoken.
Keywords
Super Linguistics, Italo-Romance, gesture, focus markers, syntax, visual-gestural modalityReferences
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