Erika Petrocchi

Erika Petrocchi is a linguist working on the syntax–pragmatics interface, with a focus on multimodal phenomena. Her research investigates how syntactic structure interacts with prosody and gesture, and how non-manual gestures are integrated into the grammatical architecture of spoken and signed languages. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she worked on the interaction between syntax, prosody, gesture, and the linguistic expression of emotion in spoken and signed languages. After her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she conducted experimental research on modal particles, focusing on their syntactic and pragmatic properties in spoken language and their alignment with co-speech gesture. She has held research and teaching positions at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the University of Padua. Her research combines theoretical and experimental approaches to language, with a focus on the structural properties of multimodal communication and their implications for syntactic theory. She is currently interested in the multimodal expression of negation in negative imperatives, with a focus on how gestures align with verbal negation and evaluative negative meanings.

Duration of the Fellowship: 01.09.2026-31.12.2026, host: C03