About me

The Scholar

I am a researcher at the University of Pisa where I work at the former Department of English Studies, now part of the new Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics. Over the past few years, I have also collaborated with the Interdepartmental Linguistics Centre (Centro Linguistico Interdipartimentale) – from which I obtained a two-year research grant (“assegno di ricerca”)  in 2011 – and with the Department of Linguistics.

My main research interests include semantics and pragmatics, language acquisition and teaching, discourse analysis, translation and ESP.

As an under-graduate student, I worked both on English and on Italian L2. I graduated with a thesis on the acquisition of Italian as a Second Language “L’acquisizione della modalità in italiano L2 di immigrati Albanofoni“, and in 2001 I taught Italian at the University of Chicago as a visiting scholar of the Department of Romance Languages.

As a post-graduate student, I focused on English linguistics, and in 2004 I obtained my PhD with a thesis on the semantics and pragmatics of English verbs of cognitive attitude: “I reckon I know how Leonardo da Vinci must have felt… A lexical semantic study of English verbs of cognitive attitude.”

Between 2004 to 2006 I held a post-doc scholarship (“assegno di ricerca”)  to investigate the acquisition of argument structure in Italian L2.

I am a certified teacher of English and over the years, I have been teaching English in schools and English Linguistics at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Pisa, for the students in the Euro-American Languages and Literatures progam as well as for the second year of the undergraduate program (Lingua Inglese 2).

Since 2006 I have also been teaching in Lucca at the Faculty of Tourism Sciences. In 2006 and 2007 I taught English linguistics to the third year students of the the degree course LEP (Letterature Europee per l’Editoria e la Produzione Culturale).

I am presently teaching English Linguistics to the students of the undergraduate degree courses in Humanities (Former Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia).

I was a member of the Pisan research team for two National Research Projects (PRIN), and my main research interests at present are lexical semantics and pragmatics and ESP (English for Tourism).

I have published several articles in Italian and international journals and I am co-editor of a book on Lexical Complexity and Translation with Prof. Marcella Bertuccelli Papi and Dr. Silvia Masi.

I am author of a book about tourism English, Sun, Sea, Sex and the Unspoilt Countryside. How the English language makes tourists out of readers, and of a book on English verbs of cognitive attitude, I reckon I know how Leonardo da Vinci must have felt…” Epistemicity, evidentiality and English verbs of cognitive attitude.

I have also had the honour of translating the Italian edition of English as a Global Language by David Crystal.