About me
The Scholar
I am a research fellow and a ‘lecturer’ at the University of Pisa where I work at the Department of English Studies. Over the past few years, I have also collaborated with the Interdepartmental Linguistics Centre (Centro Linguistico Interdipartimentale) – from which have recently obtained a two-year research grant (“assegno di ricerca”) – and with the Department of Linguistics.
My main research interests include semantics and pragmatics, language acquisition and teaching, text linguistics, 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 past two 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 have been 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.
The lively human being
My husband Marcel and I and our son Liam (oh… and Candy, our beautiful and sweet flat coated retriever) divide our time between Civitella Marittima, a village in the Upper Maremma, half-way between Siena and Grosseto, and Pisa.
In order to humour my North-American husband’s excessive sense of privacy, I will keep this short and poor in details!
Marcel is English Canadian, from Ottawa, and he works as a web developer in Pisa.
He also manages a vacation rental in my home village, Casina di Rosa, which was actually my great grandparents’ house, and one in Pisa, Behind the Tower. It is a great opportunity to make new friends. We don’t have the time to travel as much as we would like, but we do our best!
We have the sweetest and best behaved dog in the world (not thanks to us, but to the breeder, Patrizia Errera…). Actually… we have spoilt her quite a lot and now we have to fight for a spot on the sofa!