Leonardo Russo Cardona

Gonville and Caius College
  • PhD student

Contact

About

Supervisor: Prof Ian Roberts

Second Supervisor: Prof Ioanna Sitaridou

Research Topic: Voice and non-canonical passives

My main research interests lie in Generative Syntax and Romance and Greek 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.

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)

Publications:

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

Other activities and roles:

Co-chair of the Cambridge University Linguistics Society (2023-2034)

Secretary of the Cambridge University Linguistics Society (2022-2023)

Research

For my doctoral project, I am investigating the syntax of non-canonical passives, i.e. constructions that display some but not all properties normally found in passives. These include Italian impersonal/middle constructions, Romance and Greek tough-constructions, as well as other non-finite constructions. The primary purpose is to improve the theoretical understanding of Voice - the element responsible for the active/passive alternation - and providing a fine-grained parametrisation of its syntactic behaviour, especially with regard to its relationship with clause size.