Current research projects

• The Lexicon of Embodied Experience in Latin (2019–2021; Principal investigator)
• The Role of Pragmatics in Cyclic Language Change (2021–2023; PI: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, University of Manchester; AHRC Research Network Grant)
• La conversación en la Antigüedad: Análisis de la interacción verbal en griego antiguo y latín (2020–2021; PI: Rodrigo Verano, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
• PRIN National project Writing expertise as a dynamic sociolinguistic force: the emergence and development of Italian communities of discourse in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages and their impact on languages and societies (2020–2023, PI: Piera Molinelli, University of Bergamo)
• Latin WordNet 2.0 (from 2019; coordinated by William M. Short, University of Exeter, UK)

Lines of research

Historical Linguistics – Since my PhD thesis (now published as Experiential Constructions in Latin, Brill, 2014), I’ve been interested in the argument structure of verbs and their productivity, alternation and change. I am currently working on the diachrony of ditransitive verbs between Latin and Italian – see the recent volume The Diachrony of Ditransitives, co-edited with Maria Napoli (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2020).

Pragmatics – My research interests lie in uses and functions of discourse markers in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Italian. I have recently co-edited a book entitled Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: New Perspectives  (Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2017). I have worked on the diachrony of speech acts of request and apology in the history of Italian within a project on Cortesia e formalità nel rapporto tra lingue e società: dal latino a italiano e spagnolo. Another strand of research concerns Conversation Analysis – I am currently involved in an international project on the representation of conversation structure and dynamics in Latin and Ancient Greek literary texts.

Historical Sociolinguistics – I worked on Greek-Latin bilingualism, focusing on theoretical and empirical aspects concerning historical code-switching and annotating Greek switches and borrowings in a corpus of Late Latin literary texts, with the aim of examining the different functions of written bilingual communication and to assess the degree of bilingualism in literary texts of different genres.

Cognitive approaches to Classical languages and Embodiment theory – I am principal investigator of a Project on The Embodied Lexicon of Experience in Latin (2019-2021), financed by the University of Genova within a Curiosity Driven competitive call for researchers aged under 40. This project deals with the metaphorical actualization of embodiment as a bio-cultural foundation in the Roman world and explores how Latin speakers ‘made sense’ of their bodily experience of the spatial environment to express quintessential abstract concepts such as feelings and emotions.