Decades of insightful work in formal linguistics has succeeded in providing a largely unified treatment of both spoken and sign languages despite their differing modalities of externalisation (see Brentari 1993, 2019; Wilbur 1991,1996; Petronio and Lillo-Martin 1997; Neidle et al. 2000; Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006; Cecchetto et al. 2006; Napoli and Sutton-Spence 2010; Davidson 2014; Pfau et al. 2018; Kimmelmann 2019; among many others). However, the overall success of this unified approach does not mean that modality is a 'solved problem' or of secondary importance in formal linguistics---far from it. For example, it has long been noted that the physical properties of the visual-gestural modality afford a greater degree of simultaneity of expression than the auditory-spoken modality (Sandler and Lillo-Martin 2006). Simultaneity of this sort poses a prima facie challenge for theories of linearisation (particularly those requiring a total ordering among linguistic objects in a derivation, e.g. Kayne 1994), and yet it remains an under-theorised research area.
Other matters relating to modality of externalisation have received more attention in the formal literature, particularly within the last 10 years, coinciding with the rise of linguistically-grounded work on gesture (e.g., Super Linguistics: Patel-Grosz et al. 2023). Recent advancements in sign language linguistics pose exciting prospects for a formal approach to multimodality in otherwise-spoken languages.
For example, several recent works on the formal semantics of gesture observe that at least some gestures behave semantically like normal linguistic objects of a certain kind, e.g. by exhibiting scopal interactions with pieces of the spoken content they are paired with, projecting alternatives under focus, etc. (Lascarides and Stone 2009a,b; Ebert and Ebert 2014, Ebert 2024; Schlenker 2014, 2018, 2020; Schlenker and Chemla 2018; Esipova 2019a,b). Facts of this sort led Esipova (2019b) to conjecture that, if gestures behave semantically like normal linguistic objects, then they must be the product of normal linguistic derivations within a Y-model of grammar (modulo simultaneity and other modality-specific PF properties).Â
This conjecture has been further developed in very recent work on the syntax of gesture (e.g., Sailor and Colasanti 2020). For instance, Colasanti (2023a,b) argues that the inventory of functional items within a single language can be multimodal: i.e., a language may have both spoken and gestural functional morphemes. Functional items expressed in the visual modality within otherwise-spoken languages include question particles (see Jouitteau 2007 on Atlantic French and Colasanti 2023a on Neapolitan), focus markers (see Colasanti and Cuonzo 2022 and Colasanti 2023b on Lancianese), topic markers (Colasanti and Marchetiello forthcoming), epistemic markers (Marchetiello 2024), and negators (Prieto and Espinal 2020; Colasanti and Sailor 2025).
FLAMM welcomes all submissions adopting a formal approach to linguistic (multi)modality in order to address questions like those above.