Luigi Rizzi

Dr. Prof. of Linguistics

Honorary Director of the Department of Linguistics at BLCU

Guest Professor of the Department of Linguistics at BLCU

Dr. Prof. Luigi Rizzi is currently a professor of linguistics at the University of Geneva and at the University of Siena, and an honorary Chair and guest professor in the Department of Linguistics at BLCU. He studied at Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa. He was on the faculty of Departments of Linguistics in European and American Universities: in particular, he was Associate Professor at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Visiting Professor at UCLA (Los Angeles), and Visiting Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). Rizzi is an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Member of Academia Europaea. He was awarded the International Research Chair Blaise Pascal (Paris). He is Principal Investigator of the project Syntactic Cartography and Locality in Adult Grammar and Language Acquisition (SynCart), funded by an ERC Advanced Grant.He is co-director of Rivista di grammatica generativa. He has been European co-editor of Linguistic Inquiry for over ten years. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of many journals, including Language Acquisition, Probus, English Linguistics, Rivista di Linguistica, Sistemi Intelligenti, Studia Linguistica, Frontiers in Language Sciences, Studies in Chinese Linguistics, Semantics – Syntax Interface; he is “associate” to Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He was a member of the committee for the constitution of the Institut des sciences cognitives (Lyon) and of the scientific committee of the Trieste Encounters in Cognitive Science (SISSA, Trieste).

Dr. Prof. Luigi Rizzi’s research interests include syntactic theory and comparative syntax of Romance and Germanic languages; in particular, he contributed to the development of the parametric approach to syntactic comparison, to the theory of locality, to the study of syntactic representations; on the latter topic, he coordinated a series of projects on the cartography of syntactic structures. He also works on language acquisition, with particular reference to the development of morphosyntax in the child, and on the role of the theory of locality in language acquisition.