Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

A cooperation agreement has been signed between the Department of Communication and Economics and the University of York (UK) for a research in the field of comparative linguistics

The Department of Communication and Economics (DCE) of Unimore has signed an important cooperation agreement with the Department of Language and Linguistic Science of the University of York (United Kingdom) for an original research in the field of comparative linguistics.

The research has been assigned to professor Cristina Guardiano, who teaches linguistics at the DCE, and is included in the LanGeLin project (LANguages, GEnes, LINeageas – “Meeting Darwin’s last challenge. Toward a global tree of languages and genes” , coordinated by professor Giuseppe Longobardi of the University of York, who has involved on the topic a network of scholars, mainly linguists and anthropologists from various Italian and British universities, financed by the European Research Council.

The LanGeLin project has proposed an ambitious effort to reinterpret the challenge set by Charles Darwin in his “Origins of the species”: using the most advanced scientific research tools in the molecular genetic and formal linguistic field to study the historic paths that have determined the current set up of the distribution of languages and populations around the globe. The final objective is to foster the knowledge of the history of human migration and their relation with linguistic and cultural diversity.

 Professor Cristina Guardiano, who teaches linguistics at Unimore, explains that “The huge amount of information gathered by the research team of the LanGeLin project on syntactic variation of languages and its parametric representation is unprecedented. The current objective is to code and formalise these data, organising them in an electronic database, so that they can be accessed by any scholars willing to carry out a comparative study of the syntactic structures of the languages in the world. This will be the first effort to build a specific database for studying the parametric variation in the scenario of global linguistic comparison”.

“We are extremely proud of the agreement signed with the University of York for a state-of-the-art research project in the contemporary scenario of scientific study of language”, professor Giovanna Galli, director of the Department of Communication and Economics of Unimore, states. The project has been assigned to professor Guardiano, who boasts a unique set of skills in this subject, and will take advantage of the decisive support of the colleagues of the Department, well experienced in the public dissemination of research products and elegantly skilled in the communication strategies by means of digital technologies. The Department will ensure its own assistance during all phases of the organisation, update and enrichment of the database contents that may be necessary over the next years, therefore strengthening the sound research cooperation with the University of York”.

The research activities related with this agreement involve a continuous cooperation with the linguists, who are dealing with the collection and analysis of syntactic data, in particular at the University of York, and will commit the research team at Unimore for at least two years.

Categorie: International - english