PARTHICO_ People at Unimore
Cristina Guardiano - Coordinator
Universitą degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) - Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia
Cristina Guardiano is full professor of Linguistics at Unimore.
She specialized in classics and linguistics at the Universitą di Pisa, where she also got her PhD in historical syntax, with a dissertation about the internal structure of the nominal domain in Ancient Greek.
She is active in research about formal and quantitative linguistics, crosslinguistic comparison, language change, phylogenetic reconstruction, gene-language comparison. She is expert in the parametric analysis of nominal phrases, and in the comparative study of diachronic and dialectal syntactic variation, with a special focus on Greek and Romance.
She has been developing the Parametric Comparison Method (PCM) since 2001, with Giuseppe Longobardi.
She is a Fulbright alumna (2013-2014, UCLA), has been chief research associate of the ERC AG (ERC-2011-AdG) n° 295733 LANGELIN (2012-2018) and is currently a member of the SSWL (Syntactic Structures of the world’s languages: http://test.terraling.com/groups/7) research team: she is active as a property author (with Hilda Koopman), language expert, administrator. She is also a member of the TerraLing (http://test.terraling.com/) board. She has been coordinating the Unimore research unit in the MIUR PRIN projects Models of language variation and change (2019-2023) and PARTHICO (2023-2025). Other international research projects about crosslinguistic comparison: EU Border Discourse (2000-2003); CRUI-DAAD (2003-2005); Structure and linearization in disharmonic w.o. (Cambridge, 2010); Towards expl. the pre-Babel world (UCLA/Harvard, 2014), ITHACA (MIGRATION-09-2020, 2021-2025). She has been permanent visiting scholar at the Dept. of Language and Linguistic Science (York) since 2014. Other research visits/fellowships: Hannover (2003, 2004); Cambridge (2010); UCLA (2008, 2016, 2017); UPenn (Fulbright outreach, 2014); Thessaloniki (2011-2015); Patras (2006).
Her publication record includes international venues such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Frontiers in Psychology, Lingua, Journal of Physical Anthropology, Journal of Anthropological Sciences, Journal of Historical Linguistics, Journal of Greek Linguistics, L’Italia dialettale, Genes, Languages, Studi e Saggi Linguistici, The Oxford handbook of Universal Grammar (OUP), The Cambridge handbook of historical syntax (CUP), The handbook of historical linguistics (Wiley/Blackwell), The Oxford handbook of historical and diachronic linguistics (OUP), The open handbook of linguistic data management (MIT Press).
She has been member of PhD programs at Unimore, Unifi and Unipi. She has been teaching advanced PhD courses and seminars in Italy and abroad, and various graduate and undergraduate courses at Unimore since 2003. She is currently supervising the research activities of 3 PhD students and 3 PostDocs.
She has been involved in the organization of the following scientific events: Coding and Comparing Syntactic Data (2023, 2024); IRS (2022), Microwebinars (2020-2022); Linguistic Flashmobs (2020-2021); Linguistic Connections (2017-2020); Comparazione e classificazione dei dialetti d’Italia (2017); AItLA16 (2016); IGG40 (2014); Advances in phylogenetic linguistics (ERC, 2013); IGG39 (2013); Scimmie parlanti (2011); Neurolinguistica e disturbi del linguaggio (2006); DIGS9 (2006); CRUI/DAAD Meeting (2005); AItLA5 (2005); SLI 38 (2004); AItLA4 (2004); GdS Gramm. delle lingue classiche (2002); IGG27 (2001).
She is currently a member of the scientific committee of l’Italia Dialettale and of the CULT1POSTDOC panel at FWO and she has been Guest Academic Editor for PlosOne (2018, 2020). Since 2004, she has been reviewing papers and projects submitted to international journals, volumes, public and private research institutions.
Fae Hicks - Research Assistant
Fae Hicks is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh studying the interaction of phonology and syntax in the emergence of functional words in the history of English and the development of Romance languages from Latin. This comes off the back of her MRes at York where she worked with the Parametric Comparison Method on the syntax of Classical and Late Latin, a project which is continued in her current role with the study of Early Latin.
She is currently involved in the PARTHICO project as a research assistant. Her research consists in the application of the Parametric Comparison Method on the investigation of diachronic change in the (Italo-)Romance domain. The purpose is twofold: (a) developing dedicated tools for the investigation of diachronic data through the Parametric Comparison Method; (b) describe and explain the distribution of diachronic diversity in Italo-Romance. The research will perform the following tasks: (1) collect syntactic data from Late Latin and Old Italian texts; (2) collect bibliographical information about the history of language contact in Italy and its relationship with cultural and genetic information.
Gaia Sorge - PhD Student (2023)
Gaia Sorge is currently enrolled in the PhD Program on Data Science and Social Analytics at Unimore. She is an expert in Semitic languages. She graduated at the Universitą degli Studi di Napoli 'l'Orientale', with a dissertation on morphosyntactic agreement in Judeo-Arabic varieties of Libya. She is currently developing her skills in the Parametric Comparison Method, which, in her PhD project, will be applied to Semitic phylogenetics. She has published a paper about 'Gender and Number Agreement in Libyan Judeo-Arabic8 (Maydan: rivista sui mondi arabi semitici e islamici 3, 2023) and has presented her work at the conference Documenting languages, documenting cultures: migration, minorities, dialects. Universitą degli Studi di Napoli 'Federico II', February 2023 (L'accordo di genere e numero nel giudeo-arabo libico) ad at the giornate di studio di Maydan: riflessioni sui mondi arabi, semitici e islamici, Universitą degli Studi di Torino, October 2023 (Racing the clock: The (re)documentation of endangered Judeo-Arabic varieties in migratory settings, with E. Balbo). She is a member of the Editorial Board of Maydan: rivista sui mondi arabi semitici e islamici since 2023. In 2024, she joined work on Differential Object Marking in collaboration with Monica Irimia and Cristina Guardiano, presented at CIDSM18.
Monica A. Irimia - Unit member
Universitą degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (IT) - Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia
Monica Alexandria Irimia is an Associate Professor at Universitą degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia.