Lancaster University

Graduate Student, Linguistics and English Language

Thesis Title: Levels of Systematicity and Creativity in Idioms: a Socio-Cognitive Approach to Italian Data (working title)

About

On April 11, 2011 I obtained my M.A. Degree in THEORETICAL AND APPLIED LINGUISTICS from the University of Pavia (Italy), with a final mark of 110/110, cum laude.
On January 16, 2012 I joined the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University (UK) as a Ph.D. student in LINGUISTICS. I will be working on a project addressing the cognitive status of idioms, adopting a usage-based theoretical framework close to the family of approaches known as Construction Grammars (with particular reference to Langacker's Cognitive Grammar), integrated with insights related to the sociopragmatic dimension of language.


More generally, my research interests include the following:

- THE COGNITIVE BASIS OF SEMANTICS AND GRAMMAR (mental networks of schemas and constructions, frame semantics, metaphor & metonymy, blending, idioms, polysemy, compositionality, prototype theory, simulation semantics, meaning as conceptual knowledge);

- THE EMBODIED DIMENSION OF COGNITION (the bodily and cultural origins of human cognition, cognition as shaped by the bulk of embodied experiences in the physical as well as sociocultural environment, the neural correlates of human manifest behavior, the action-based nature of perceptual representations, organisms as dynamic systems);

- THE ROLE OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN SHAPING COGNITION AND LANGUAGE (the strong influence of sociopragmatic factors in shaping the nature of human cognition and language, the interplay between intra- and interpersonal mechanisms which underlie joint attention and shared intentionality)

- THE PROBABILISTIC NATURE OF LEARNING AND REASONING (the statistical-heuristic basis of learning; abductive reasoning as the creation and selection of hypotheses)

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