Agenda

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.

I completed my PhD in Romance Linguistics at UCLA in 1989, and I have held academic positions
at Cambridge University (UK) and Stony Brook University (USA), where I was Chair of the
Linguistics Department from 2018-2023. I have published extensively and lectured widely on the
history and phonology of the Romance languages, in particular Italian and endangered Romance
languages. I am primarily interested in the interaction of prosody with other areas of grammar
(phonetics, morphology, syntax). To that end, my research examines the phonology and syntax of
clitics pronouns and imperatives, the prosody and intonation of Italian and Italian dialects, as well
as the adaptation of foreign words to the phonology and morphology of the borrowing language.
Other recent projects include collaborative work on ablaut reduplicative structures (Linguistic
Typology 2024), phonotactic restrictions on Mandarin consonant clusters (NACCL 2021, WECOL
2020), and an innovative asynchronous general education course in Linguistics (Language 2023). I
have conducted field research throughout Europe, which has been funded in part by both the
National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I have been elected
to Phi Beta Kappa, and I was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty
Service. I am a member of the editorial board of numerous scholarly journals (Probus, Forum
Italicum, Isogloss), and I am a member of the Advisory Committee of the Global Council on
Anthropological Linguistics.

2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and
teaching stay.

Given the internationally renowned program in Linguistics at Ca’ Foscari and the many experts in
Linguistics and Italian dialects here and at other nearby universities, Venice is the perfect place for
me to spend a period as Visiting Scholar. I will continue work on an on-going project with Prof.
Anna Cardinaletti on the unique properties of pronominal clitic clusters in northern Italian dialects,
I will begin a study with Prof. Giuliana Giusti on geminate consonants in the dialect of Ancona, and
I will offer a series of seminars on the phonology-syntax interface.

3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department of
Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies in the past?

Yes, this is somewhat of a homecoming for me! I have collaborated extensively with Prof. Anna
Cardinaletti for nearly 25 years, and we have numerous joint publications and presentations. I gave
a series of lectures at Ca’ Foscari on “Contemporary Issues in Phonological Theory” in 1998, and a
seminar on “Restrizioni sui nessi clitici” in 2018. I am a Member of the Comitato Editoriale degli
Annali di Ca’ Foscari - Serie Occidentale, sezione di Linguistica, and a Member of the Comitato
Scientifico of the series “Linguaggio e Variazione” Edizioni Ca’ Foscari. I am also part of the
Erasmus+ ICM International Mobility project grant between Ca’ Foscari and Stony Brook
University.