Name: Leonardo Russo Cardona

College: Gonville & Caius College

Email: lr548@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor: Prof Ian Roberts

Research Topic: Middle si constructions in Italian: evidence from non-finite clauses

About

My main research interests lie in Formal Syntax and Comparative (Graeco-)Romance Linguistics. 

Before starting my PhD, I completed a MA in Linguistics and Cognitive Studies at the University of Siena (2020-2022), during which I spent one year in Cambridge as an exchange student. My final dissertation studied Italian middle constructions in a minimalist perspective.

My passion for Linguistics first emerged during my undergraduate education: although I was studying Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Pisa and at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (2017-2020), I received some training in Linguistics and graduated with a thesis on different measures of linguistic distance.

Research
For my doctoral project, I am mainly studying Italian and Romance impersonal/middle constructions (i.e. involving the clitic ‘se/si’) in infinitival clauses involving tough movement, but I am also considering other relevant languages (such as some Italian dialects and Modern Greek) where a similar interaction between Voice and tough movement can be found. The primary purpose is improving the theoretical understanding of these problematic components of Romance grammar and providing a fine-grained parametrisation of their syntactic aspects.

Scholarships/Prizes

My PhD project is jointly funded by:

• OOC AHRC DTP Studentship 
• Cambridge Trust Studentship

Other scholarships/prizes:

• Bell-Wade bursary for sport together with academic excellence (awarded by Gonville & Caius College, 2022)
• Erasmus+ Scholarship (awarded by the University of Siena, 2021-2022)
• Erasmus+ Scholarship (awarded by the University of Pisa, 2019)
• Sant’Anna Studentship (full funding for undergraduate studies, awarded by the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, 2017-2020)

Fellowships

• University Fellow at the Aspen Institute Italy (2021-2024)

Conference Papers
Isolani, E., Russo Cardona, L. 2022. On the application of the Parametric Comparison Method to the CP in Indo-European languages. Talk given at the Parametric Comparison Method Workshop (18/02/2022), University of Cambridge. dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.23267.22561

Publications
Russo Cardona, L. 2022. Italian Middle Si: Evidence from Non-finite Clauses. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics 14(1), 228–241.