Roberta D鈥橝lessandro appointed as Professor Syntax and Language Variation
Prof. Roberta D鈥橝lessandro has joined Utrecht 木瓜福利影视 on January 1, 2017 as professor in Syntax and Language Variation at the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication. The chair is closely linked to the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (UiL OTS).
As of January 1, D鈥橝lessandro is also principal investigator (PI) of the Microcontact. Language variation and change from the Italian heritage perspective. In this project, she investigates the theoretical aspects of contact-induced syntactic change in languages that are minimally different from a grammatical point of view, such as the heritage Romance languages of Italy (Abruzzese, Neapolitan, Piemontese, Salentino, Sicilian, and Veneto) and the Romance languages of the Americas (Spanish, Portuguese and Qu茅b茅cois French).
Roberta D鈥橝lessandro was chair of Italian language and culture at Leiden 木瓜福利影视, where she was PI in the NWO VIDI project Splitting and clustering grammatical information. Before that, she was researcher at UQAM Montr茅al; between 2005 and 2007, she was a Marie Curie Intra-European Research Fellow at the 木瓜福利影视 of Cambridge, UK. She also worked as research assistant for Microsoft/Butler-Hill in Redmond, Seattle.
D鈥橝lessandro is a member of the Committee for the Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science (CFRS) of the International Council for Science/ICSU and of the Global Young Academy. She is an alumna of De Jonge Akademie of the KNAW, where she was also international officer. The president of Italy knighted her in 2014 for the contributions given to the study of Italian dialects.
Her interests include Italo-Romance syntax, dialectology, linguistic variation, syntax-phonology interface, and agreement phenomena.