Books by Erika Petrocchi
Il volume, che prende le mosse da un ciclo di seminari
tenutosi all’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezi... more Il volume, che prende le mosse da un ciclo di seminari
tenutosi all’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia,
si propone un’esplorazione delle opportunità
euristiche legate al concetto di confine.
Raccogliendo tredici contributi afferenti ad ambiti
disciplinari diversi e organizzati in quattro sezioni
tematiche, nel suo complesso esso ambisce
a mostrare l’arbitrarietà sottesa al tracciamento
di ogni confine e a far luce sulla meccanica
che orienta i processi di partizione.
Papers by Erika Petrocchi
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2024
In this article, we address the issue concerning the gestural patterns in expressing surprise and... more In this article, we address the issue concerning the gestural patterns in expressing surprise and disapproval across various languages and cultures. The results obtained so far point to an interesting, and in a sense rather surprising, uniformity. We consider two types of special questions: counter-expectational questions expressing surprise and surprise-disapproval questions, i.e., sentences expressing surprise with a negative orientation, and adopt an experimental design involving sentence repetition and spontaneous production. We focus on the realization of these sentences in Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, which we compare with the results previously obtained for Italian and replicated for Neapolitan, Spanish and German. Our research is based on the Minimalist theoretical framework developed by Chomsky and scholars in the tradition of generative grammar.
The current process of marginalisation involving Italian Sign Language (LIS) is a socio-political... more The current process of marginalisation involving Italian Sign Language (LIS) is a socio-political process the roots of which are not limited to scientific findings concerning deafness. This makes possible a comparison between the results of the most significant scientific studies on deafness with the ongoing progressive LIS marginalisation. Such a comparison represents an occasion to reflect upon the boundary often instituted by the oralist discourse as well as by medical practitioners and professionals between supposedly 'healthy', hearing people on the one hand and people who have a 'medical condition', that is, deaf people, as a conceptual – and not natural, although naturalised – construction.
Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, 2017
Il volume, che prende le mosse da un ciclo di seminari tenutosi all'Università Ca' Foscari di Ven... more Il volume, che prende le mosse da un ciclo di seminari tenutosi all'Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, si propone un'esplorazione delle opportunità euristiche legate al concetto di confine. Raccogliendo tredici contributi afferenti ad ambiti disciplinari diversi e organizzati in quattro sezioni tematiche, nel suo complesso esso ambisce a mostrare l'arbitrarietà sottesa al tracciamento di ogni confine e a far luce sulla meccanica che orienta i processi di partizione.
In this work I argue in favor of an integrated model of syntax,
prosody and gesture in Italian S... more In this work I argue in favor of an integrated model of syntax,
prosody and gesture in Italian Sign Language (LIS) for two
kinds of special questions: counter-expectational and surprise-disapproval questions. I capitalize on work by Giorgi & Dal
Farra (2018) on oral languages and consider the interaction of
these three components in LIS, a language realizing prosody
by means of a different modality (non-manual components),
paying attention also to the presence
of gestures accompanying signs. Furthermore, in order to
investigate the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural nature of the
gestural component, I conducted a pilot study on the
realization of the same sentences in non-western languages:
Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese.
Sign languages represent an interesting research ground where it is possible to test the tenabili... more Sign languages represent an interesting research ground where it is possible to test the tenability of the language universals claimed to be valid for spoken languages. This work fits in this theoretical perspective. Particularly, we investigate here the existence of parentheticals introducing Free Indirect Discourse (FID) in Italian Sign Language (LIS). First of all, parentheticals are phenomena strongly affected by prosody. It is interesting to study the same phenomenon in a language that has a “visible (visive) prosody”. Secondly, parentheticals are also syntactic phenomena that interest the Left Periphery of a clause. Syntactically speaking, it means that the parenthetical should be a syntactic constituent of the expression in which it is contained. Giorgi (2015) proposes that parentheticals are syntactically represented as a layer in the left periphery of the clause, headed by a prosody oriented head named K. In Giorgi’s view, the prosodic feature known as comma, is also a head...
Talks by Erika Petrocchi
PhD Thesis by Erika Petrocchi
PhD Thesis, 2022
This dissertation investigates the realization of (rhetorical) surprise questions in
Vietnamese,... more This dissertation investigates the realization of (rhetorical) surprise questions in
Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Italian Sign Language (LIS). Formal studies on the realization of surprise questions in Western oral languages have shown that In Italian (Giorgi and Dal Farra 2018; Giorgi and Dal Farra 2019), German (Giorgi, Dal Farra and Hinterhölzl to appear) and Spanish (Furlan 2019, MA Thesis) both sentence types are characterized by a peculiar syntactic representation, a special intonation, and a typical gesture pattern. Alignment has been detected between gesture, prosody, and syntax in all these languages. The stroke of the hand gesture and/or the head movement is realized in correspondence with the leftmost pitch (usually the pitch on the nuclear syllable of the verbal form). The same (manual and nonmanual) gestures have
been found in the case of surprise questions in German, Italian and Spanish. To investigate whether these similarities are due to cultural similarities among the various languages, I run some experiments (repetition and elicitation tasks) studying the realization of these special questions in three culturally and geographically distant languages, and in sign language -- where prosody is realized in the visual gestural-modality (nonmanual components). The striking similarities observed in the Western languages studied until now are present also in the Eastern languages I investigated and in LIS. Furthermore, I detected a remarkable formal and functional regularity in
the nonmanual and manual gestural patterns. The basic nonmanual components do not vary across languages. The difference between LIS and other languages is that the nonmanual components are grammaticalized. I found alignment between the gestural, prosodic and syntactic components in all the languages studied. The results suggest that we must favour a theoretical framework that privileges a multimodal account, i.e. a theoretical account integrating syntax, prosody and gesture. The appropriate interpretation and pragmatic properties of surprise questions can be fully captured only by analyzing all these components as relevant at the sensorimotor interface.
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Books by Erika Petrocchi
tenutosi all’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia,
si propone un’esplorazione delle opportunità
euristiche legate al concetto di confine.
Raccogliendo tredici contributi afferenti ad ambiti
disciplinari diversi e organizzati in quattro sezioni
tematiche, nel suo complesso esso ambisce
a mostrare l’arbitrarietà sottesa al tracciamento
di ogni confine e a far luce sulla meccanica
che orienta i processi di partizione.
Papers by Erika Petrocchi
prosody and gesture in Italian Sign Language (LIS) for two
kinds of special questions: counter-expectational and surprise-disapproval questions. I capitalize on work by Giorgi & Dal
Farra (2018) on oral languages and consider the interaction of
these three components in LIS, a language realizing prosody
by means of a different modality (non-manual components),
paying attention also to the presence
of gestures accompanying signs. Furthermore, in order to
investigate the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural nature of the
gestural component, I conducted a pilot study on the
realization of the same sentences in non-western languages:
Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese.
Talks by Erika Petrocchi
PhD Thesis by Erika Petrocchi
Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Italian Sign Language (LIS). Formal studies on the realization of surprise questions in Western oral languages have shown that In Italian (Giorgi and Dal Farra 2018; Giorgi and Dal Farra 2019), German (Giorgi, Dal Farra and Hinterhölzl to appear) and Spanish (Furlan 2019, MA Thesis) both sentence types are characterized by a peculiar syntactic representation, a special intonation, and a typical gesture pattern. Alignment has been detected between gesture, prosody, and syntax in all these languages. The stroke of the hand gesture and/or the head movement is realized in correspondence with the leftmost pitch (usually the pitch on the nuclear syllable of the verbal form). The same (manual and nonmanual) gestures have
been found in the case of surprise questions in German, Italian and Spanish. To investigate whether these similarities are due to cultural similarities among the various languages, I run some experiments (repetition and elicitation tasks) studying the realization of these special questions in three culturally and geographically distant languages, and in sign language -- where prosody is realized in the visual gestural-modality (nonmanual components). The striking similarities observed in the Western languages studied until now are present also in the Eastern languages I investigated and in LIS. Furthermore, I detected a remarkable formal and functional regularity in
the nonmanual and manual gestural patterns. The basic nonmanual components do not vary across languages. The difference between LIS and other languages is that the nonmanual components are grammaticalized. I found alignment between the gestural, prosodic and syntactic components in all the languages studied. The results suggest that we must favour a theoretical framework that privileges a multimodal account, i.e. a theoretical account integrating syntax, prosody and gesture. The appropriate interpretation and pragmatic properties of surprise questions can be fully captured only by analyzing all these components as relevant at the sensorimotor interface.
tenutosi all’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia,
si propone un’esplorazione delle opportunità
euristiche legate al concetto di confine.
Raccogliendo tredici contributi afferenti ad ambiti
disciplinari diversi e organizzati in quattro sezioni
tematiche, nel suo complesso esso ambisce
a mostrare l’arbitrarietà sottesa al tracciamento
di ogni confine e a far luce sulla meccanica
che orienta i processi di partizione.
prosody and gesture in Italian Sign Language (LIS) for two
kinds of special questions: counter-expectational and surprise-disapproval questions. I capitalize on work by Giorgi & Dal
Farra (2018) on oral languages and consider the interaction of
these three components in LIS, a language realizing prosody
by means of a different modality (non-manual components),
paying attention also to the presence
of gestures accompanying signs. Furthermore, in order to
investigate the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural nature of the
gestural component, I conducted a pilot study on the
realization of the same sentences in non-western languages:
Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese.
Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Italian Sign Language (LIS). Formal studies on the realization of surprise questions in Western oral languages have shown that In Italian (Giorgi and Dal Farra 2018; Giorgi and Dal Farra 2019), German (Giorgi, Dal Farra and Hinterhölzl to appear) and Spanish (Furlan 2019, MA Thesis) both sentence types are characterized by a peculiar syntactic representation, a special intonation, and a typical gesture pattern. Alignment has been detected between gesture, prosody, and syntax in all these languages. The stroke of the hand gesture and/or the head movement is realized in correspondence with the leftmost pitch (usually the pitch on the nuclear syllable of the verbal form). The same (manual and nonmanual) gestures have
been found in the case of surprise questions in German, Italian and Spanish. To investigate whether these similarities are due to cultural similarities among the various languages, I run some experiments (repetition and elicitation tasks) studying the realization of these special questions in three culturally and geographically distant languages, and in sign language -- where prosody is realized in the visual gestural-modality (nonmanual components). The striking similarities observed in the Western languages studied until now are present also in the Eastern languages I investigated and in LIS. Furthermore, I detected a remarkable formal and functional regularity in
the nonmanual and manual gestural patterns. The basic nonmanual components do not vary across languages. The difference between LIS and other languages is that the nonmanual components are grammaticalized. I found alignment between the gestural, prosodic and syntactic components in all the languages studied. The results suggest that we must favour a theoretical framework that privileges a multimodal account, i.e. a theoretical account integrating syntax, prosody and gesture. The appropriate interpretation and pragmatic properties of surprise questions can be fully captured only by analyzing all these components as relevant at the sensorimotor interface.