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Dr Norma Schifano

College position(s)

Director of Studies

Subject

Linguistics

Specialising in

Comparative Romance linguistics

Degrees, Awards and Prizes

MA (Ca' Foscari University of Venice), BA (Ca' Foscari University of Venice), PhD (Clare College), FHEA

Research themes

My research focuses on documenting and theorizing morphosyntactic change and variation in Romance, with a particular focus on language contact, both diachronically and synchronically. Recently I have also become interested in ethical challenges and opportunities raised by collaborations between academics and third-sector organizations representing linguistic minorities.

My first monograph (Verb Movement in Romance, Oxford University Press, 2018) challenges how word order variations in verb placement across Romance have been traditionally analysed and develops a principled morphosyntactic account which successfully predicts the great wealth of microvariation attested within this language family. Taking this work as a point of departure, I have extended my investigations to examine correlations between verb movement and seemingly unrelated morphosyntactic phenomena across a wide range of early and modern Romance (non-)standard varieties, resulting in numerous co-authored publications with Adam Ledgeway (Università degli Studi di Bergamo). 

Since working as an RA on the Leverhulme-funded project Fading Voices in Southern Italy (2015-2019, Cambridge) my research has explored a wealth of contact-induced morphosyntactic phenomena in the highly endangered Italo-Greek varieties of southern Italy. This decade-long investigation, resulting in numerous publications with Adam Ledgeway (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) and Giuseppina Silvestri (UCLA), has culminated in a new co-authored monograph (Greek-Romance Language Contact in Southern Italy: documentation and theory, forthcoming, Oxford University Press). 

Beyond Italy, my endeavours to document and analyse language contact in linguistic minorities have extended to the largely overlooked Latin American community in the UK, leading a pilot project funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2022-2025).

In 2017 I co-founded the Linguistics@InMFL Project with Michelle Sheehan (Newcastle University). This is now a multi-institutional collaborative project which aims to investigate and provide evidence for the viability of including linguistics as an element of MFL teaching in the UK curriculum. Along with the team, I have published extensively in pedagogical linguistics.

Responsibilities

Course contact for:

  • ITA3/IT1: Introduction to Italian Language: Texts and Contexts (linguistics component)
  • IT2: Structures and Varieties of Italian / IT10: The Language of Italy
  • CS1: The Romance Languages (Michaelmas only)
  • Language Contact (MPhil in Linguistics and Language Sciences)

Role within the College

  • External Director of Studies in Linguistics

Role within the University

  • Assistant Professor in Italian and Comparative Romance Linguistics

Extra links