Roberta D’Alessandro will be giving an invited talk at the Workshop Geographic Information Systems and Social Networks: Consequences for the Study of Linguistic Variation, which will take place at the UAB Barcelona on November 30.

Microcontact will be present at the WSF 2017, which will be held in Jordan in November. Roberta D’Alessandro will give a talk on research integrity at the thematic workshop on THE FUTURE OF THE UNIVERSALITY OF SCIENCE.

Jan Casalicchio and Francesco Ciconte attended the SLE conference in Zurich, which took place on September 10-13. Jan Casalicchio presented a paper entitled The syntax of embedded gerunds in Romance. Francesco Ciconte presented a paper entitled Postverbal subjects in old Italo-Romance. Stay tuned for the drafts!

Roberta D’Alessandro will spend two weeks as a visiting professor at the IRH-ICUB (Institute for Research in the Humanities) at the University of Bucharest. In Bucharest, Roberta D’Alessandro will give a course on Romance microvariational syntax. She will also give a Lunchtime seminar on October 5 on Language and Languages. On the importance of linguistic variation…

From 6-8 September, 2017, Roberta D’Alessandro attended a Summer School on Evidence and Policy, co-organised by the EU Joint Research Council (JRC) and the International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA) and the Slovac Academy of Sciences (SAS). The topic of the summer school was Migration and Demographic Change. Roberta took masterclasses on how to read…

TIME CHANGE! For our Microcontact team meeting on September 27 we will read a recent Nature paper on creolization, which is being largely debated these days in different venues: Blasi, Michaelis, and Haspelmath. 2017. Grammars are robustly transmitted even during the emergence of creole languages. Nature Human Behaviour. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0192-4. For background prep, please read…

On September 26, Roberta will be attending the annual conference of the JRC of the European Commission. The conference is entitled EU4facts. Evidence for policy in a post-fact world. The conference will address the following issues: Why should we trust science? – The role of science in times of fake news and ‘filter bubbles’. Re-designing policymaking using behavioural…

Roberta D’Alessandro is one of the invited speakers for the Biolinguistic Conference on Interface Asymmetries, which will take place in New York in November 10-12, 2017. She will present a paper with the title When variation is built in the system.  

Four new project members have been selected to join our team between July and August. Jan Casalicchio (post-doc), will be working on the diachrony of Italo-Romance varieties in contact with Italian. Jan is now post-doc at the University of Trento, and is an expert of both diachronic syntax and northern Italo-Romance languages. Luana Sorgini, PhD candidate, from…

The book edited by Roberta D’Alessandro with Irene Franco and Ángel Gallego is finally out! More info here