Overview | Research directions | Members | Publications | Ongoing Collaborations
Overview
Linguistics aims at understanding the place of language within other human cognitive faculties. Along the way, it tries to answer questions that range from the inner working of individual constructions to broad models of the way language might have evolved, how it is processed in the brain and which of its aspects might be the by-product of biological constraints. We address these issues with a wide range of tools, from theoretical analysis to computer modeling to brain data of sentence processing.
Research directions
- The Syntax/Semantics Interface: Nominals and Beyond - Our more theoretical work addresses fundamental issues in the semantics of nominals: how (is)definiteness is expressed even in language that have no definites; how we refer to classes of objects or make generalizations on them; how the “part of” relation is expressed across languages. At a broader level, we are interested in fostering a fruitful interplay between denotation- and distribution-based semantics;
- Novel methods for linguistic research - A second side of our research is concerned with the development of novel methodologies for doing linguistic research. We are currently investigating the extent to which human linguistic intuitions, possibly derived via crowd-sourcing, can be modeled computationally using neural networks, and the possibility of collecting valid linguistic data (especially, oral data) using online games.
On the brain side, we are working at detecting the ERP signature of the processing of ill-formed sentences from pure mental rehearsal.
Members
Current Staff-students
- Roberto Zamparelli, Principal Investigator
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Sia Vosh Sepanta, PhD student
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Allison Keith, LCT Master student
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Andrea de Varda, LMI student
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Nicola Sartorato, LMI student
- Aria Nourbakhsh, guest, Post-Master fellow)
- Luca Ducceschi, Teaching fellow
- Stefano Bellelli, LMI master student
- Michelangelo Falco, Post Doc
- Rossella Varvara, PhD student
- Matteo Mascelloni, LMI Master student
Publications
For a complete list see Roberto Zamparelli personal page
Ongoing collaborations
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Cristiano Chesi, IULM, Pavia;
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Prof. Caroline Heycock, University of Edinburgh;
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Prof. Vespignani, University of Padova;
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Simonetta Montemagni, ILC “A. Zampolli”, CNR.