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Dr. Valentina Colasanti

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

Dr. Valentina Colasanti

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

 VALENTINA.COLASANTI@tcd.ie

 3531896 4035


BA (Sapienza, Rome), MA (Sapienza, Rome), MPhil (Cantab), 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 sub-family 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 phenomena at the interface between syntax and semantics. In 2019, after taking up an assistant professorship in linguistics at Trinity College Dublin, 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). In 2020, I established the 'Gestural Grammar Lab' at Trinity College Dublin after successfully competing for funding from (i) the Trinity Long Room Hub (Arts and Humanities Research Institute), (ii) the Higher Education Authority of Ireland, (iii) the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and (iv) the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Trinity College Dublin. I am currently the director of the GestuGram Lab, which so far comprises two PhD students, one lab manager, five research assistants, and two fieldworkers. Visit the GestuGram Lab website at: https://valentinacolasanti.it/gestugram/
  diachronic syntax   gesture   ITALO-ROMANCE   LANGUAGE VARIATION   ROMANCE LINGUISTICS   Syntax   syntax-pragmatics interface
Project Title
 Gestural Grammar: Investigating Gestures in Southern Italy (GestuGram)
From
2020
To
2023
Summary
Funding Agency
Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute
Programme
Research Incentive Scheme 2019-21

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
Valentina Colasanti and Craig Sailor, Some Formal Properties of Gestural Polar Response Markers, Linguistics Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 2025 Annual Meeting, University of Suffolk, UK, 3-5 September 2025, 2025, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, and Craig Sailor, Some formal properties of gestural polar response markers, Trinity Forum on Formal Linguistics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, 28 February 2025, 2025, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
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, University of Suffolk, UK, 4-6 September 2025, 2025, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina and Martina Wiltschko, Demonstratives locate referents in common space and ground: A comparative syntactic approach, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2025, Journal Article, PUBLISHED
Colasanti, Valentina, and Martina Wiltschko, I am here and this is new. You are there and that is old. The role of speaker and addressee in the interpretation of demonstratives, Functional categories, dimensions of meaning, and expletiveness, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 12-14 June 2024, 2024, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
Colasanti, Valentina, and Martina Wiltschko, am here and this is new. You are there and that is old. The role of speaker and addressee in the interpretation of demonstratives, 16th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 16): The morphosyntax of speaker and hearer, University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium, 5-6 October 2023, 2023, Conference Paper, PUBLISHED  URL
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  URL
  

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Valentina Colasanti, Dimensions of meanings in co-speech gestures, Workshop on Linguistic multi-dimensionality, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, 13 December 2024, 2024, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Valentina Colasanti, The grammatical contribution of gestures: a research programme, GLif (Formal Linguistics Research Group) Seminars, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, 12 December 2024, 2024, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
Valentina Colasanti, The syntacticisation of gestures. The contribution of the Romance languages of Italy, Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting, University of Manchester, 25--27 June 2024, 2024, Invited Talk, PUBLISHED
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