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Dr. Valentina Colasanti

Assistant Professor in Linguistics (C.L.C.S.)
ARTS BUILDING

 VALENTINA.COLASANTI@tcd.ie

 3531896 4035


Biography

BA, MA (Rome), MPhil, PhD (Cantab) I am a linguist. My research profile is situated at the interface between theoretical generative linguistics and Romance linguistics (especially focused on the Italo-Romance subfamily of languages spoken in Italy). Most of my publications contribute to the field of theoretical linguistics as applied to the Romance languages. In the last six years, I have extended my domain of investigation to the study of spoken discourse phenomena at the interface between syntax and semantics (e.g., nominal and clausal left-peripheral phenomena, presentatives, discourse deixis, etc.). Recently, my interests grew further into the study of phenomena expressed in the visual-gestural modality. Such phenomena have been almost entirely overlooked in theoretical linguistics. I began to study gestures from a purely formal perspective for the first time, drawing empirically from the languages of Southern Italy. My main project, Gestural Grammar: Investigating Gesture in Southern Italy (GestuGram; PI: Colasanti), received funding from the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute (2020-23), the Higher Education Authority of Ireland (2021-23), the Provost"s Office of Trinity College Dublin (Provost"s PhD Project Award; 2021-25), and Enterprise Ireland (2023-25).

Research Tags

  diachronic syntax   gesture   ITALO-ROMANCE   LANGUAGE VARIATION   ROMANCE LINGUISTICS   Syntax   syntax-pragmatics interface

Research Projects

 Gestural Grammar: Investigating Gestures in Southern Italy (GestuGram)

Memberships

Membership of Professional Institutions, Associations, Societies

Details Date From Date To
The Philological Society, UK 2014 present
Société de Linguistique Romane 2016 present
Societas Linguistica Europaea 2016 present
Scholar, St John's College, Cambridge 2014 present
Colasanti, Valentina, Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 8, (1), 2023, p1 - 45, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Colasanti, Valentina, Gestural focus marking, Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 9, ((4)/5), 2023, p1 - 39, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Colasanti, Valentina, Auxiliary selection in Southern Lazio. Some implications for Romance microvariation and its limits, L'Italia Dialettale, LXXXIV, 2023, p97 - 150, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  URL
Colasanti, Valentina, Cuonzo, Clara, Gestural focus marking in Italo-Romance, Romance Languages: Recent Contributions to Linguistic Theory, Harvard University, 28-29 April 2022, 2022, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, Cuonzo, Clara, Gestural focus marking, PerForum. Forum on Performativity in Language and Beyond, University of Oslo, 3 June 2022, 2022, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Colasanti, Valentina, Il riciclaggio della deissi spaziale in deissi discorsiva nell'italo-romanzo, XXXe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, Campus de Guajara - Universidad de La Laguna, 4-9 July 2022, 2022, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Colasanti, Valentina, Micro-contact in Southern Italy: language change in Southern Lazio under pressure from Italian, Languages, (7), 2022, p286 , Journal Article, PUBLISHED  URL
Colasanti, Valentina, Linguistically-integrated co-speech gestures in Southern Italo-Romance, Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology meeting, Helsinki University, 8-10 September 2021, 2021, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Colasanti, Valentina, Linguistically-integrated gestures: a case study from the languages of Southern Italy, Linguistic Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Annual Meeting, Online, 6-9 September 2021, 2021, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Colasanti, Valentina, Gestural fieldwork: a case study from Southern Italy, Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 6, SOAS London, 16-18 December 2021, 2021, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
  

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Colasanti, Valentina, Syntactically-integrated co-speech gestures: some preliminary evidence from the languages of Southern Italy, SuperLing Colloquium, University of Oslo, 4 June 2021, 2021, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, Not everything changes: acquisition failure and feature reassignment, Linguistics Research Colloquium, Ulster University, 28 June 2021, 2021, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, Spatial and discourse deixis and the interactional structure of nominals: Romance and beyond, Romance Linguistic Circle, online, 28 November, 2021, University of Cambridge/University of Newcastle, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, Investigating Gesture in Southern Italy, Linguistics Research Seminars, online, 10 November, 2021, Trinity College Dublin, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, Linguistically-integrated gestures: a case study from the languages of Southern Italy, SyntaxLab, online, 19 October, 2021, University of Cambridge, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, Presentative particles in Romance and the Speaker-Addressee interaction, Eh-Lab. Syntax of Speech Act, University of British Columbia, 20 November 2018, 2018, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, Matrix complementizers in Italo-Romance, Eh-Lab. Syntax of Speech Act, University of British Columbia, 6 October 2017, 2017, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED