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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Professor Adam Ledgeway

Photo of Professor Adam Ledgeway
Position(s): 
Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics
Department/Section: 
Italian
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
Contact details: 
College: 
Location: 

Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom

Curriculum Vitae

About: 

Following completion of his PhD (on Romance complementation) 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. Since 2013, he has been Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics. In 2016 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2021 he was made a Member of the Academia Europaea.

 

Teaching interests: 

Comparative Romance linguistics

Linguistics of all individual Romance languages

Romance dialectology

Romanian language

Latin

Syntax (especially GB, Minimalism, Cartography)

Morphology

Phonetics & Phonology

Historical Linguistics

 

Research interests: 

Adam Ledgeway's research interests include the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Italian dialectology, Latin, Italo-Greek, syntactic theory, linguistic change and language contact. His research is channelled towards bringing together traditional Romance philological scholarship with the insights of recent linguistic theory. He has worked and published extensively on such topics as complementation, complementizer systems, auxiliary selection and split intransitivity, word order, Verb Second, configurationality, alignments, cliticization, clause structure, functional categories, the fine structure of the left periphery, differential object marking, the relationship between inflection and periphrasis, verb movement, adjectival positions, agreement, negation, subjects, causatives, voice distinctions, finiteness, imperatives, the development of demonstrative and deictic systems, determiner systems, possessives, grammaticalisation, parameters, Greek-Romance contact, and the syntax–phonology and syntax–pragmatics interfaces.

 

Recent research projects: 

2005-07: European Commission Marie Curie Actions grant (€152,809) for project ‘Abruzzese Syntax’ (Ledgeway PI; D’Alessandro: RA).

2009-11: European Commission Marie Curie Actions grant (€163,702) for project ‘Dialectal variation and the definition of finiteness: finite and non-finite dependent clauses in two dialect clusters’ (Ledgeway PI; Damonte: RA).

2015-17: European Commission Marie Curie Actions grant (€183,455) for project ‘Reflexive clitics in Aromanian’ (Ledgeway PI; Mavrogiorgos: RA).

2015-18: Leverhulme Major Research Grant (£253,863) ‘Fading voices in southern Italy: Investigating language contact in Magna Graecia’ (Ledgeway PI; Schifano: RA; Silvestri: RA)

 

Published works: 

Please see Adam Ledgeway's publications here.