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Introduction
I focus on morphosyntax and lexical semantics, exploring these areas through both theoretical and experimental approaches. My research spans nominalization, parasynthesis, compounding, and reduplication, combining theoretical and comparative methods. While specializing in Romance, Germanic, and Slavic, I have also worked on Mandarin, Bantu, and Kwa languages. Additionally, I examine morphological awareness and other skills in typical and atypical populations, both monolingual and bilingual.
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October 2007 - present
October 2007 - November 2015
Education
January 2004 - January 2007
Publications
Publications (56)
Based on Italian data, this paper focuses on the aspect-related properties of nominalizations of psychological predicates that realize the Experiencer argument as the direct object (Object Experiencer, OE). In particular, it deals with the possibility (or impossibility) of preserving the agentive/eventive semantics, available to a subset of OE verb...
The paper provides a comprehensive account of the derivation of action nominals in Esahie, a Ghanaian language of the Tano subgroup (Kwa, Niger-Congo) which has been undocumented thus far, especially as far as morphosyntactic phenomena are concerned. The aim of the research is threefold: to contribute to language documentation, to provide a systema...
Although phonological deficits are unanimously recognized as one of the key manifestations of developmental dyslexia, a growing body of research has reported impairments in morphological abilities. Our study aimed at casting further light on this domain by investigating the morphological awareness skills of 21 children with dyslexia (mean age 9.10...
L2 children experience more difficulties in literacy acquisition than their monolingual peers, and their fragilities could be misdiagnosed as learning disabilities. In this light, an accurate identification of the L2 literacy profile is of utmost importance for improving clinical and educational practices. The few available studies on L2 Italian in...
The volume espouses an ecosystemic standpoint on multilingual acquisition and learning, viewing language development and use as both ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Multilingualism is inclusively used to refer to sociolinguistic diversity and pluralism. Whether speech, writing, gesture, or body movement, language is a conduit that carries meaning wit...
Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic diffe...
In this paper we propose an analysis of the reading behaviour of a group of Italian monolingual (n= 24) and bilingual (n= 35) 2nd schoolgraders, engaged in the tasks of reading aloud lists of isolated words and nonwords (from the DDE-2 test battery), as well as narrative connected texts displayed on the touch-screen of a common tablet, to be read e...
This is a survey article on neoclassical word formation, which is the creation of new lexemes with Ancient Greek or Latin elements. Neoclassical word formation does not only combine formatives of classical origin (e.g. hydrophobic) but may also involve native words (e.g. hydrofoil, webology). Despite being borrowings from the classical languages, n...
This is a survey entry on neoclassical word formation, which is the creation of new lexemes with Ancient Greek or Latin elements. Neoclassical word formation does not only combine formatives of classical origin (e.g. hydrophobic ) but may also involve native words (e.g. hydrofoil, webology ). Despite being borrowings from the classical languages, n...
In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handled by means of zero affixes and of the theoretical debate around the advantages and disadvantages of employing such null morphemes in theoretical modeling. While the advantage of positing zero affixes is straightforward from an empirical perspective (se...
In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (to climb > the climb-Ø
N) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals (examin-ation
). We argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero m...
The present article discusses the interplay between bilingualism and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), i.e., a neurodevelopmental disorder that negatively affects children’s language expressive and comprehension abilities. Given the close resemblance between the developmental language trajectories of typically developing
L2 children and langua...
Developmental Dyslexia is a lifelong condition characterized by reading and
spelling deficits that persist into adulthood, negatively affecting the individual’s academic and professional careers. Although numerous studies have
been conducted to assess the effectiveness of reading interventions in children,
providing promising results, research on a...
In recent times, paradigmatic approaches to word formation have become increasingly popular, but the very concept of derivational paradigm is still far from being clear and universally accepted: While paradigms are a useful construct for the treatment of inflectional phenomena, less straightforward is their adoption in the realm of derivation, whic...
The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of...
Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the mom’ are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic (im)plausibility in pro...
Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual’s language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interac...
In the typology of West African languages, tone has been noted to play crucial grammatical and lexical roles, but its function in word formation has been less systematically explored and remains to be fully understood. Against this backdrop, the present study seeks to examine the form and function of tonal morphology in the formation of action nomi...
Subordinate and synthetic represent well-attested modes of compounding across languages. Although the two classes exhibit some structural and interpretative analogies cross-linguistically, they denote distinct phenomena and entail different parameters of classification. Specifically, subordinate makes reference to the grammatical relation between t...
Over the last 50 years, an extensive body of research has shown that phonological processing skills correlate with reading achievements in alphabetic orthographies. Furthermore, research has consistently found that phonological processing skills are impaired in subjects with dyslexia, while research on sequential bilinguals, although showing mixed...
Nonword repetition is typically impaired in dyslexia. Conversely, native-like performance is early achieved by bilingual children whose second language has a simple phonotactic system, like Italian. Our study aimed at comparing the performance of monolingual and bilingual children with and without dyslexia in a nonword repetition task modeled after...
This contribution addresses the issue of one of the instances of non-standard negation, the so-called expletive negation (EN). Though it discusses data from a variety of languages, it mainly concentrates on Italian, proposing that the behavior of EN in comparative, exclamative and temporal clauses warrants an analysis of EN in terms of an operator...
Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performa...
In questo contributo sarà esaminata una classe eterogenea di costruzioni morfosintattiche in due lingue tipologicamente distanti, l’italiano e il ci- nese mandarino. In particolare, saranno analizzate le costruzioni formate da un verbo supporto e un nome di evento in -ata in italiano e la redu- plicazione verbale con valore delimitativo in cinese,...
In this chapter, we shed new light on the reduplicative processes of Mandarin Chinese and assess the structural and interpretive properties of the input/base and output of these word formation phenomena. In particular, we focus on the categorial status of the base and ad- dress the issue of whether reduplication applies to category-free roots or fu...
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this tas...
It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises al...
In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko’s Wug Test...
This paper contains a lexico-semantic analysis of Cognate Constructions (CCs), i.e. argument structure patterns in which the verb and its nominal complement are morphologically or semantically related, mainly based on Italian data. We identify three types of CCs which display morphologically cognate nouns in Italian, namely: i) the Cognate Object C...
Mandarin verbal reduplication is generally regarded as a phenomenon conveying an aspectual value since it temporally bounds the event expressed by the base verb, thus resulting in a (counter-iconic) 'diminishing' semantics. In this paper, we put forward a novel syntactic account of diminishing reduplica-tion in Mandarin, which derives the aspectual...
The topic of reduplication in Sinitic languages has attracted much attention in the literature, but studies adopting a comparative and areal perspective are still lacking. This paper aims to analyse the correlations between form and function in reduplicating constructions in a sample of twenty Sinitic languages, representing eight branches of the f...
Result nouns are deverbal nouns denoting the object or the state produced by the event expressed by the base verb. Interestingly, many Indo-European languages possess a limited amount or lack altogether dedicated and productive morphological means to form result nouns. The polysemy of deverbal action nouns emerges as an important tool for expressin...
The main aim of this paper is to underpin the connection between the semantic relationship binding the constituents of verbs and the formal and semantic properties of their reduplication in Sinitic. We will first discuss in detail verbal and adjectival reduplication in Standard Mandarin, the best described Chinese language; we also collected data o...
The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexicon theory (GL, Pustejovsky, 1995; Bassac and Bouillon, 2001). This scheme has been tested on a set of compounds automatically extracted from the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) both in Italian and French. The motivation is twofold. On the one hand, it sho...
In this paper, we examine the event/result meaning contrast displayed by Italian nominals derived from creation and redescription verbs, such as costruzione ‘construction, building’ and traduzione ‘translation.’ The goal of our research is twofold. First, we intend to verify whether the intriguing pattern of polysemy exhibited by these nominals may...
This article presents a cross-linguistic survey of endocentric root NN and exocentric VN compounds in a set of typologically and historically unre- lated languages, with a special focus on Bemba (Bantu), Italian (Romance) and Mandarin Chinese.
The aim of the paper is twofold. From an empirical viewpoint, we intend to offer a contrastive analysis of...
This chapter is dedicated to parasynthetic compounding, a word-formation phenomenon consisting of the merger of two lexical stems (forming a non-existent compound) with a derivational suffix. On the basis of several classes of data pertaining to Slavic and Romance, we outline a formal analysis of the phenomenon in question and show that a construct...
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The study of compounds is currently at the center of attention in many areas of both theoretical and applied linguistics. This volume brings together contributions by experts involved in a wide range of such areas, based on a large number of diverse languages – spoken and signed. The fact that compound constructions are at the interface of the vari...
In this article, I outline a theoretical proposal able to account for the compositional semantics of both E and R nominalizations by focussing on a single, specific aspect of this intricate issue: namely, the formal representation of the lexical semantic import of the suffixes which are the heads of such complex forms. To achieve this, I explore in...
The aim of this paper is to present the MORBO/COMP project, which has reached its final stage in development and will soon be published on-line. MORBO/COMP is large database of compound types in over 20 languages. The data for these languages have been collected and analysed by a group of morphologists from various European countries.
This contribution deals with semantically ambiguous event/result nominalisations and is aimed at showing and explaining why only certain classes of base verbs yield the relevant semantic ambiguity in their derived nominals, while other classes only give unambiguous event nominals. In particular, the focus of the investigation lies in the lexical se...
This paper deals with the event/result meaning contrast displayed by most deverbal Action Nominals (AN). We claim that this intriguing pattern of inherent polysemy is peculiar when compared with standard cases of dot objects because the result sense is temporally and cau-sally depended on the event sense. We attempt a formal modelling of the lexica...
L'oggetto di indagine di questo articolo è l'interpretazione dei nomi deverbali dell'italiano ottenuti per mezzo di suffissi trasposizionali. Questi nomi presentano frequentemente ambiguità lessicale: pertanto viene qui esplorato in un quadro d'analisi prettamente sincronico l'insieme delle interpretazioni raggruppate sotto il nome "risultato", ovv...
