
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom
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 and, since 2015, the Chair of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Professor Ledgeway welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to his 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
Adam Ledgeway's research interests include the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Italian dialectology, Latin, Italo-Greek, syntactic theory, and linguistic change. His research is channelled towards bringing together traditional Romance philological scholarship with the insights of recent generative syntactic theory, and he has worked and published extensively on such topics as complementation, complementizer systems, auxiliary selection and split intransitivity, word order, configurationality, alignments, cliticization, clause structure, functional categories, verb movement, adjectival positions, agreement, negation, subjects, causatives, voice distinctions, finiteness, imperatives, the development of demonstrative and deictic systems, grammaticalisation, parameters, and language contact.
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)
Please see Adam Ledgeway's publications here.