My vision
As a language student, I was often struck by the overwhelming number of exceptions that came with rules. I soon learned that languages exhibit a gradient behaviour, and rules can just capture the endpoints of a continuum of possibilities
The core of my research on language variation and change focuses on the “unexplored middle ground” between what is certainly possible and what is highly unlikely or impossible. From a probabilistic perspective, speakers have a statistical knowledge driving their choice of alternative linguistic forms in subtle ways. I investigate all aspects influencing language variation and the trajectories of language change: human processing abilities, frequency patterns, contextual features, social and discourse-pragmatic conventions.
About me
Indialetto
I was born and raised in Palermo (IT), where I lived until I was 22 years old. My Sicilian roots and background are very important to me and to my identity. I grew up in a sunny and warm place, in a chaotic city, full of colors, scents and problems. My island has been a crossroad of cultures and languages, and I regard this mixture as the very core of Sicilianity. In this context, I was raised monolingual (at least in theory) as my main language is Italian. Sicilian was spoken all around me, my grandparents were regularly using it, as well as many adults in my life, especially to express anger or irony. Moreover, I could hear it on the street, some other kids could speak it too, and I could understand it very well. But I was forbidden to use it: Parla bene! Non parlare in dialetto! When I was little, I thought Indialetto was the name of that forbidden language. It was forbidden because it was vulgar and wrong, typical of illiterate and rude people, especially inappropriate if used by women.
In line with the teenage rebellion, when I was in high school I started using the forbidden language, but since I was not completely fluent, my vocabulary was and still is heavily influenced by Italian. My Italian, in turn, is enriched by Sicilian calques and loans, and it is characterised by a Palermitan accent, of which I am very proud.
Already as a kid, I was fascinated by languages. I was often asking questions to my cousin (who grew up in Northern Italy) about how she would say certain words, comparing vocabulary and pronunciations in our varieties. I found that amusing, definitely much more than she did. I also wondered whether people who spoke multiple languages knew all the words in all of them. My dad had spent some time in England in his 20s, so I used to ask him if he knew random words in English, making endless lists of names of the objects I could see around me: do you know how to say quadro, scala, armadio, caffettiera, etc.
When I finally started studying English, at the age of 11, I dove into it, and never had enough. I was extremely excited by the idea that I could become fluent, and multiply the possibilities of thinking and expressing thoughts. It became my main dream.
Discovering Linguistics
I have always been a language nerd, since the day I started studying my first foreign language (English). Following my passion, in highschool (liceo linguistico), I studied English, Spanish, French and Latin, alongside Italian, my native language. I have first met linguistics during my undergrads in Modern Languages and Literature at the University of Palermo. The day I bought my first linguistics handbook I was thrilled by the idea of learning everything about languages and how they work. I obtained my BA degree in 2014 with a final work on the grammaticalisation of discourse markers (focussing on a comparison between English and Spanish case studies from the literature). This topic sparkled my interest for language change, which has been my main research focus since then.
Linguistics became my main academic interests, therefore I decided to pursue a Research Master’s degree at Leiden University (2014-2018), which gave me the opportunity to get to know a broad variety of different linguistic frameworks and sub-disciplines. Thanks to the excellent program, the many LOT schools, and the professional guidance of the lecturers, I learn a lot and explored this discipline from different angles. During my MA, I also taught Italian as a foreign and second language to bilingual children, bachelor students and adults. In my MA thesis, I conducted a corpus study of private letters in 17th and 18th century Dutch, analysing the sociolinguistic factors behind the historical alternation between the variants mij and mijn as object pronouns.
After my MA degree (2018), I moved to Belgium and joined the research project Beyond the clause: enconding and inference in clause-combining at KU Leuven, as a PhD student. In 2022 I defended my doctoral dissertation entitled Syndetic and asyndetic complementation in Spanish a diachronic probabilistic account.
My PhD Research
My dissertation focuses on the alternation between syndetic and asyndetic finite complement clauses in Spanish. Syndetic complements, introduced by an explicit complementizer que ‘that’, as in (1a), are the most frequent patterns of complementation in Present‑day Spanish. Alternatively, a complement clause can also be introduced asyndetically, i.e. without the complementizer que, as shown in (1b), where the absence of the complementizer is indicated by “Ø”.
Le ruego que me deje pasar
Le ruego Ø me deje pasar
‘I beg you to let me pass’ (Lit. ’I beg (that) you let me pass)
Inmaculada Alvear, El sonido de tu boca. Spain, 2005, Theatre play
Asyndetic complementation has been considered a “syntactic fashion” (Pountain 2015) which spread starting from the 15th century and eventually lost popularity, becoming a marginal construction in Present-day Spanish. However, the grammatical, stylistic and social motivations that might have caused its spread and decline remain understudied. In this work, I rely on the concept of probabilistic grammar (Bod, Hay & Jannedy 2003; Bresnan 2007), by assuming that the constraints that regulate the syndetic/asyndetic alternation are probabilistic rather than categorical. Together with the analysis of language‑internal predictors, I consider the role of language-external factors, such as social power (Brown and Gilman 1960), style and Discourse Traditions. With this aim, I use descriptive and inferential statistics (mixed-effect logistic regression) to investigate the diachronic changes of the language-internal and language-external probabilistic constraints (Szmrecsanyi 2013a), in order to understand how they have affected the distribution of the variants.
The dissertation is articulated in three case studies: two on historical data (15th to 18th centuries) from the corpus CODEA+2015 (GITHE 2015) and one on present-day data (21st century), based on a manually compiled written-corpus and on the spoken corpus PRESEEA (2014). The main results show that between the 15th and the 18th century the asyndetic variant was mainly used to mark a higher level of integration between main and subordinate clause (Mazzola, Cornillie & Rosemeyer 2022, cf. Givón 2001), and that the alternation is sensitive to processing constraints such as the Complexity Principle (Rohdenburg 1996) and the Domain Minimisation principle (Hawkins 1999; 2004).
From the socio-stylistic perspective, the alternation is influenced by external factors, such as the type of audience addressed (Bell 2001) and the Discourse Tradition of the document (Kabatek 2005). Asyndetic complementation was typically employed in speech acts which entailed a deferential request addressed to someone with higher social power (Mazzola, Rosemeyer & Cornillie 2022). Finally, the analysis of the 21st-century data confirms that the asyndetic construction is extremely infrequent and that the morphosyntactic and semantic constraints are affected by the decline to a larger extent, whereas processing constraints are conserved. From the constructional point of view, this indicated that the asyndetic construction underwent deschematisation: from an abstract subschema of complementation to a less schematic, lower-level construction (Croft 2003; Barðdal & Gildea 2015). I argue that this grammatical change can be attributed to external and “environmental” factors (Szmrecsanyi 2013b), such as the changes of its typical Discourse Traditions and environments, affected by the historical evolution of social conventions.
Overall, this dissertation has changed the view of Spanish asyndetic complements in terms of their chronology, probabilistic grammar and socio-stylistic distribution, and has contributed to the investigation of the intricate relationship between language change and social conventions. More specifically, this study improves our general understanding of syntactic alternations and their diachronic development by stressing the important role played by all sorts of predictors in the development of language variation and change, including: grammatical and processing constraints, momentary fancies, cultural contacts, social and ideological transformations.
My current research project
I am currently part of the research team of the Leverhulme Trust funded project “How autonomous is syntax? A case study of Romance causation and perception” (PI prof. Michelle Sheehan) on the syntax and semantics of causative and perception verbs, with a focus on micro variation across Romance varieties. The main aim of the project is to investigate the transparency of the syntax/semantics mapping in relation to causative (‘make’/‘let’) and perception verbs (‘see’/‘hear’/‘watch’) across Romance. Within this research team I am responsible for the data collection and analysis of Ibero-romance and Italo-romance varieties.
To learn more about this project, visit the CauRPe website.