Biography
I studied for a BA in Italian and a BA in Classics at Leiden University. In my third year, I spent a semester at the University of Bologna. My interests include (theoretical) syntax, historical linguistics and Italian dialectology. I therefore continued my studies in Leiden with a MA in Italian and a Research MA in Linguistics, for which I wrote a dissertation about the history of phrasal verbs in Italo-Romance varieties and a dissertation about inflected infinitives in Romance respectively.
In Cambridge, I will be studying for a PhD at the department of Italian. My research will focus on the development of the inflectional domain from Latin to Italo-Romance varieties. Within generative syntax, the inflectional domain is considered to be the part of the derivation of a sentence where phenomena such as verbal agreement, subject licensing and verb movement take place. Since the transition from Latin to Romance is relatively well documented with respect to other language families, it constitutes a perfect testbed for our hypotheses on how language structure can change, both from a historical and dialectological viewpoint.
Other academic interests
- Language and language history
- Italian history and culture
- Classics
