Marina Nespor (born 3 November 1949 in Milan, Italy) is a Professor of linguistics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy,[1] and senior researcher in the ERC PASCAL Project, a project investigating language acquisition and the nature of the biological endowment that allows humans to learn language.
The 1986 book Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is considered a classic work within its subfield.
The book, written in Italian, introduces the standard elements of language – phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics – commonly encountered in linguistics courses.
[9] Work by Nespor and colleagues considers gestures that accompany speech part of a broad system of communication prosody.
Based on their findings, the authors propose a general system of prosody that includes gesture as well as phonological elements of speech.