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Abstract

Abstract

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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/content/journals/10.1075/gest.25018.xav
2026-04-02
2026-04-19

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/content/journals/10.1075/gest.25018.xav
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John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.25018.xav
/content/journals/10.1075/gest.25018.xav
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: digital list ; discourse functions ; formal aspects ; Brazilian Portuguese ; Libras

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