About me

I am a second year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Toronto. My research focuses on morphosyntactic variation in heritage languages spoken in the Greater Toronto Area, and in particular heritage Italian languages (not just Standard Italian, but also regional languages - the so called “dialects” - such as Sicilian, Calabrese, Venetan, etc.) In my research I use both quantitive and qualititve methods to explore and explain how langauge changes in multilingual societies. I am particularly interested in changes at the morphosyntax/pragmatic interface (phenomena sych as word-order, pro-drop), and how we use both corpus data analysis and experimental methods to explore this type of variation.

I am also a Research Assistant for the Heritage Language Variation and Change Project (PI: Naomi Nagy).

Here is a list of the topics that I’m currently working on:

1. Possessive order variation in homeland and heritage Calabrian-Italian and loss of regional markedness in this variety as a result of standardization.
2. Language Ideologies among Heritage Calabrian-Italians, tentions between Standard Language Ideologies and Authenticity in the use of Italian vs Calabrese.
3. Language documentation of Romagnol, an endangered and under documented Romance language spoken in the North-East of Italy.

I’ll keep updating my research outputs here. Feel free to reach out!