Academic Interests
semantics
spoken language
text linguistics
discourse markers
verbs
emotions
translations
discourse analysis
children’s literature
language acquisition, trilingualism
national identity, multiculturalism
About
I am a linguist working on modern Italian. My research focuses on discourse studies and contrastive linguistics. It can be conceived as a triangle formed by three vertices that correspond to three components: lexical items, culture, and personality. I study the connections between them, possible configurations, and influences. I am particularly interested in cross-linguistic differences and similarities.
Among my favourite readings about language are Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular, I like the two following quotations: (1) The limits of my language means the limits of my world; and (2) If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. Thus, I am convinced that describing a language, we can describe another world, or the society where this language is used. When analysing the words used by the speaker, we can better understand the speaker’s world, and we can learn something new about the Other and the Other’s world.
My publications contribute to three linguistic fields: 1) discourse markers, 2) problems of communication (construction and interpretation of communicative messages), and 3) language acquisition and multilingualism (in particular, L3 acquisition). Different approaches are used within each field and different linguistic phenomena are analysed.
Academic background
I have been exposed to three academic research traditions. I graduated from the Faculty of Philology at the Lomonossov Moscow State University, where I defended my PhD dissertation on Italian discourse markers (superv. Tatiana B. Alisova).
I had several study- and research- stays in two Italian universities: Università degli Studi di Firenze and Università di Padova. In Florence, I was in contact with Emanuela Cresti and Massimo Moneglia, founders and directors of LABLITA laboratory working on spoken language. They generated my interest to spoken language and recordings of the everyday speech. In Oslo, in collaboration with TextLab, I have created the corpus SILaNa: Spoken Italian: Interviews about Language and Nation, http://tekstlab.uio.no/silana/corpus.html. (contains thirty-two interviews conducted with Italian native speakers living in Norway and with Italian nonnative (but near-native) speakers living in Italy and offers very rich material for further linguistic and sociolinguistic studies).
At the University of Padova, I have been influenced by the courses hold by Michele Cortelazzo, Lorenzo Renzi, and Laura Vanelli. Discussions about the language and the world with Renzi and Vanelli were very important for my academic thinking.
I have studied in Paris at the University Paris VII Denis Diderot, where I, first, achieved DEA (diplôme d’études approfondies) in theoretic, formal, and applied linguistics and then wrote and defended my second PhD dissertation entitled Les mots du discours formés à partir des verbes dire/skazat' en français et en russe (superv. Denis Paillard). In Paris, I have been working within a research group Description of the operative words of the language (discourse markers, prefixes, and prepositions). Contacts with other linguists studying different (not only European, but also Oriental) languages, participation in seminars and workshops, and discussions with my supervisor were crucial for shaping my linguistic approach, developing my research methods, and for my further development as a linguist and as a researcher.
Teaching
I have taught in different classrooms for students with different cultural and linguistic background: courses on bachelor’s and master’s levels within various fields of Italian linguistics, including phonetics and phonology, grammar (morphosyntax), lexicology, dialectology, textual linguistics, and academic writing; moreover, courses on History of Italian language and on Romance philology, as well as practical courses (from elementary level (A1) up to proficient level (C2).
