What is it about?
Spoken language lists can be accompanied by digital lists: manual actions by means of which the fingers of the non-dominant hand are associated with the spoken listed items. In this paper we offer an overview of the formal aspects of digital list constructions and their contextual motivations in Brazilian Portuguese. We also describe their discourse functions. To achieve these goals, we analyzed 125 digital list constructions collected from 77 online videos, using the work of Wilcox et al. (2023) as a framework. Our results show that digital list constructions in Brazilian Portuguese typically begin at the pinkie finger. Discursively, they show that such constructions are used to introduce and refer back to referents, as well as to organize discourse. We conclude that digital list constructions in Brazilian Portuguese share many similarities with list constructions in signed languages, especially in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), but also exhibit striking differences.
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Why is it important?
Few studies have investigated digital list constructions that co-occur with speech. This studies not only does that using Brazilian Portuguese data but also compares them with digital list constructions in Brazilian Sign Language.
Perspectives
This research opens new venues for research. Future research should also investigate if topics influence the occurrence ofdigital list constructions; if speakers vary in their preference for using digital lists;if interlocutor characteristics (e.g., age, educational level) affect a speaker’s use ofdigital list constructions; and, if formality versus informality influences the useof multimodal list constructions. In addition, future studies should investigate theextent to which the ‘pinkie versus index finger’ and ‘bottom-up versus top-down’distinctions observed in Brazilian Portuguese and Libras digital list constructionsalso apply to other spoken and signed languages.
André Xavier
Universidade Federal do Paraná
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This page is a summary of: Pinkie first, Gesture, April 2026, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/gest.25018.xav.
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