Functional gestures as morphemes: Some evidence from the languages of Southern Italy

Abstract

Recently, gestures have been a topic of much interest in formal linguistics, especially with respect to their semantic contribution (Ebert & Ebert 2014; Schlenker 2018a; Esipova 2019a; i.a.). A consistent observation within this literature is that the semantic content of gestures can be integrated into the meaning of spoken utterances. One way to explain the semantic contribution of gestures is to treat them as part of the grammar: namely, if gesture can participate in semantic relations, it is because they appear in syntactic representations (Jouitteau 2004; 2007; Sailor & Colasanti 2020; Colasanti 2021a; b; to appear). Following this previous literature, I present some preliminary data on the conventionalised co-speech gesture Mano a Borsa (MAB; i.e. 🤌🏽 ‘pursed hand’ in Neapolitan, a southern Italo-Romance language. Based on original fieldwork with 96 speakers in Naples, I argue that MAB is the realisation of a particular flavour of interrogative C, consistent with its preference for aligning with the beginning of the clause in wh-interrogatives, even in wh-in-situ contexts. In other words, I argue that MAB exhibits behaviour typical of a wh-question morpheme, albeit one whose PF realisation happens to be gestural rather than spoken.