NYU Florence
Graduate Studies Seminar
Adam Ledgeway: Testing Linguistic
Theory and Variation to their
Limits.
The Case of Italo-Romance
Drawing on a number of corpus studies, including a considerable amount of data taken from my own corpora of textual and fieldwork studies on the dialects of
Italy, I shall explore, in a manner which is accessible to both general scholars of
Italian and to linguists, how the richly documented diachronic and areal variation exhibited by the
Romance languages, and in particular the dialects of Italy, offers an unparalleled wealth of linguistic data. It will be shown that the linguistic varieties of Italy represent a perennially fertile and still under-utilized testing ground which has a central role to play in challenging linguistic orthodoxies and shaping and informing new ideas and perspectives about language change, structure and variation. At the same time, I will demonstrate how a familiarity with current key ideas and assumptions in theoretical linguistics has an important role to play in understanding the structures and patterns of the linguistic varieties of Italy, and, in particular, those known to us only through the texts of earlier periods where native speakers are not available to provide crucial grammaticality judgments and fill in the missing empirical pieces of the relevant puzzle.
Adam Ledgeway
PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN AND ROMANCE LIGUISTICS, CHAIR, FACULTY OF MODERN AND MEDIEVAL LANGUAGES, DEPARTMENT OF ITALIAN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Following completion of his PhD (in
Romance linguistics) at the
University of Manchester in
1996 and a
Research Fellowship at
Downing College (1996-97), Adam Ledgeway became
Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer and then
Senior Lecturer in Romance Philology at the
University of Cambridge, and since
2013 has been
Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics.
Since October 2015 he has been
Chair of the Faculty of
Modern and
Medieval Languages. He regularly lectured at numerous international conferences, has held visiting professorships at the Universities of
Venice and
Zurich, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the
University of Bucharest in 2016.
His research interests include the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Italian dialectology,
Latin, Italo-Greek, syntactic theory, and linguistic change. Recent books include: Sui dialetti italoromanzi. Saggi in onore di
Nigel B.
Vincent,
Norfolk, Biddles,
2007 (co-edited with D.
Bentley); Didattica della lingua italiana: testo e contesto,
Perugia, Guerra, 2008 (co-edited with
A.L. Lepschy);
Diachrony and Dialects. Grammatical
Change in the
Dialects of Italy,
Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2014 (with P. Benincà and N. Vincent).
- published: 23 May 2016
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