Multimodality in Grammar. The case of special questions expressing surprise in oral and sign language

Abstract

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.