Clara on Lancianese RING gesture at Harvard and Oslo

Marking focus or precision with pinched thumb and index finger.

April 28-29, Clara Cuonzo is with Valentina Colasanti (Trinity College Dublin) at "Romance Languages: Recent contributions to linguistic theory," a conference at Harvard organized in part by alumna Cilene Rodrigues *04, presenting their recent work together on the co-speech use of the RING gesture in Southern Italy: they give syntactic evidence, based on newly collected data, that in Lancianese, a language of Abruzzo, the gesture can be used to mark either narrow or broad focus in relation to a spoken utterance. A month later, on June 3, the two will present their joint work at PerForum, a conference on gesture and expressive meaning in Oslo.