Abstract
In this session, we will discuss some fundamental tenets of Generative Grammar: since the object of the investigation is the competence of the speaker, intuitions or judgments provide the necessary evidence for the phenomena that are to be explained by the theory of grammar. In fact, the use of introspection and grammaticality judgements also characterized my early work on focus and syntactic variation.
Mini bio
Silvio Cruschina is Professor of Italian at the University of Helsinki. His PhD dissertation (Cambridge, 2009) was on the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and on the correspondences between word order alternations and interpretive effects in Romance, especially in Sicilian and in Italian, within a cartographic approach to syntactic structures. After his doctoral studies, he worked as a research assistant on two AHRC-funded projects: ‘Autonomous Morphology in Diachrony: Comparative Evidence from the Romance languages’ (Oxford, 2009–2010), and ‘Existential Constructions: An Investigation into the Italo-Romance Dialects’ (The University of Manchester, 2011–2013). He was then Assistant Lecturer at the University of Vienna (2014–2018), with a temporary visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) during the academic year 2017–2018. He moved to the University of Helsinki in January 2019, where he first worked as an Associate Professor and then became full Professor in January 2024.
Silvio specializes in Romance linguistics, in particular Italian, Sicilian, and other dialects of Italy. His area of expertise is syntax, but his research interests range over a variety of subjects and topics, including information structure, pragmatics, diachronic variation, the syntax and pragmatics of questions, the categories of evidentiality and mirativity and their grammatical manifestations. He is the author of Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections (OUP, 2012) and, together with Delia Bentley and Francesco Maria Ciconte, of Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy (OUP, 2015). He has also co-edited several volumes and journal special issues, and has published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Glossa,Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Isogloss, Word Structure, and Probus.