I graduated in Classical Languages at the University of Pisa in 1998. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Pavia. I worked on the semantics of passive constructions within a cognitive-typological framework. The languages examined are Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish. If you are interested in any of my contributions and papers, please contact me.

Current position: Ricercatore (Università degli Studi dell'Insubria - Facoltà di Giurisprudenza, Como). Affidamento del corso progredito di Laboratorio di analisi di Dati Linguistici (CdL Specialistica in Linguistica Teorica e Applicata, Università di Pavia).

Language Typology, Areal Typology, Grammaticalization and Language Change, Passive and Impersonal Constructions, Modality, Person/Number in language, Imperatives and other directive expressions, Semantic maps, Computational Linguistics, Language Resources.

• 1997-2000: Med-Typ (Languages in the Mediterranean area: Typology and convergence); national coordinator: R. Lazzeroni; member of the research unit on Deixis (Università per Stranieri di Siena; local coordinator: M. Benedetti)
• 2003-2006: FIRB research program on Europe and the Mediterranean as linguistic areas (national coordinator: P. Ramat)
• 2005-2007: PRIN research program on "Mutamento e acquisizione di categorie linguistiche" (national coordinator: P. M. Bertinetto; local coordinator: A. Giacalone) 

Books/Edited volumes

1. (2003) Degrees of event elaboration. Passive constructions in Italian and Spanish. Materiali Linguistici 40. FrancoAngeli, Milan. [Reviewed by Sylviane Lazard in Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, tome cent un, fascicule 2, pp. 268-272, 2006].

2. (2005) A. Baicchi, C. Broccias, A. Sansò (eds.), Modelling thought and constructing meaning: cognitive models in interaction. Materiali Linguistici 50. FrancoAngeli, Milan. [Reviewed by Ad Foolen, Folia Linguistica, 41 (3/4), 2007, pp. 443-448]. 

3. (2007) A. Sansò (ed.), Language Resources and Linguistic Theory. Materiali Linguistici 59. FrancoAngeli, Milan.

4. (2009+) Caterina Mauri, Andrea Sansò (eds.), What do languages code when they code realisness? [Proceedings of the Forlì workshop with the same title]

Published/submitted papers

1. (1999) "A Frame-Based Discourse Semantics for the So-Called Manner-of-Motion Verbs". In H.Bunt, R.Muskens, E.Thijsse (eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Computational Semantics (IWCS III), 403-406. Tilburg, The Netherlands, January 13-15, 1999.

2. (1999; with M. Nissim) "Discarding Expectations when Building Bridges: The Need for a Revision Procedure". In Proceedings of Vextal, 309-314. Padova, Unipress.

3. (1999; with M. Nissim and C. Soria) "Towards a Compositional Frame Semantics". In Proceedings of ECCS 99, Siena, 27-30 October 1999.

4. (2002) "Passive and Patient Topicalization: Beyond the Common View", in Samiian V. (ed.), Proceedings of the Western Conference On Linguistics (WECOL 2000), Volume 12, 428-442. Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno (CA).

5. (2002) "A network for the passive", in Andronis, Mary, Christopher Ball, Heidi Elston and Sylvain Neuvel (eds.), CLS 37: The Main Session. Papers from the 37th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vol. 1, 517-533. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

6. (2003) "The network of demotion. Towards a unified account of passive constructions". In Ken Turner and Katarzyna Jaszczolt (eds.), Meanings Through Language Contrast, Vol.1, 245-260. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

7. (2003) "Typological databases: A new approach", in: Hajicová, E., Kotešovcová, A., Mírovský, J. (eds.), Proceedings of CIL17, CD-ROM. Matfyzpress, MFF UK. Prague, 2003. ISBN: 80-86732-21-5.

8. (2003) "Passivo ed individuazione dell'evento: un confronto italiano-spagnolo", in M. Giacomo Marcellesi, A. Rocchetti, (a cura di), Il verbo italiano. Studi diacronici, sincronici, contrastivi, didattici, Atti del XXXV congresso internazionale di studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana (SLI), Parigi, 20-22 settembre 2001. Roma, Bulzoni.

9. (2004) MED-TYP: A Typological Database of Mediterranean Languages, in Proceedings of LREC 2004, Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal, 24-30 May 2004.

10. (2005) entries: "Voice"; "Compositional Semantics"; "Archaeology and language"; "Sprachbund", in P. Strazny (ed.), Encyclopedia of Linguistics, New York: Taylor and Francis.

11. (2005) "Semantic maps in action", in A. Baicchi, C. Broccias, A. Sansò, Modelling thought and constructing meaning: cognitive models in interaction, Milano, FrancoAngeli.

12. (2006) "'Agent defocusing' revisited: Passive and impersonal constructions in some European languages". In Werner Abraham, Larisa Leisiö (eds.), Passivization and Typology: Form and Function, 232-273. Typological Studies in Language. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

13. (2006) Documenting variation across Europe and the Mediterranean: The Pavia Typological Database. In ELDA (ed.), Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006), Genoa, 22-28 May 2006. Pp. 2164-2169.

14. (2007; with Anna Giacalone Ramat) "The spread and decline of indefinite man-constructions in European languages: An areal perspective", in P. Ramat & E. Roma (eds.), Europe and the Mediterranean as linguistic areas: Convergencies from a historical and typological perspective, 95-131. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

15. (forthcoming?; with Thomas Stolz) "The Mediterranean area revisited. Word-iteration as a potential Mediterraneanism". Orbis, Peeters Publishers, Leuven.

16. (2008; with Paolo Ramat) "Per una definizione dell'area linguistica mediterranea", in V. Orioles, F. Toso (a c. di), Mediterraneo Plurilingue, Atti del convegno internazionale, Genova, 13-15 maggio 2004.

17. (forthcoming; with Anna Giacalone Ramat) "L'emploi indéfini du nom de l'homme en latin tardif", in O. Spevak (ed.), Actes du colloque sur la quantification en Latin (Centre Alfred Ernout) (provisional title), Paris: L'Harmattan.

18. (2007; with Anna Giacalone Ramat) "The indefinite usage of uomo, 'man', in early Italo-Romance. Grammaticalization and areality", Archivio Glottologico Italiano XCII (I): 65-111.

19. (2007; with Caterina Mauri and Federica da Milano) "Linguistica Tipologica e prassi computazionale. L'esperienza del Pavia Typological Database", Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata XXXVI (2): 311-329.

20. (2007) "Language resources and linguistic theory. By way of introduction" in A. Sansò (ed.), Language Resources and Linguistic Theory, 7-12. Milan: Franco Angeli.

21. (2007; with Caterina Mauri and Federica da Milano) "The Pavia Typological Database", in A. Sansò (ed.), Language Resources and Linguistic Theory, 67-79. Milan: Franco Angeli.

22. (2009) "How "conceptual" are semantic maps?", Linguistic Discovery (Special issue on Semantic Maps, guest-edited by Michael Cysouw, Martin Haspelmath, and Andrej Malchukov)

23. (2009) "The dynamic potential of probabilistic semantic maps. Comment on 'Similarity semantics and building probabilistic semantic maps from parallel texts' by Bernhard Waelchli (2009)". Linguistic Discovery (Special issue on Semantic Maps, guest-edited by Michael Cysouw, Martin Haspelmath, and Andrej Malchukov)

24. (in preparation; with Caterina Mauri) "The sources of directives"

25. (2009+) "Su un caso di (mancata) grammaticalizzazione: aner e anthropos come elementi indefiniti/generici nella storia del greco". In I. Putzu, G. Paulis, G. Nieddu, P. Cuzzolin (a cura di), La morfologia del greco tra tipologia e diacronia. Atti del VII Incontro internazionale di linguistica greca (Cagliari 13-15 settembre 2007). Milano: Franco Angeli.

26. (2009+) "Mediterranean Languages" (will appear in Europe [Field of Linguistics] edited by J. van der Auwera and B. Kortmann, Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter). 

27. (2009) "Men, women, and birds. An embryonic system of noun classification in Ancient Greek", Folia Linguistica 43 (1), 99-137.

28. (2009+; with Caterina Mauri) "The reality status of directives and its coding across languages", Language Sciences (Special Issue on "What do languages code when they code realisness?", guest-editors C. Mauri & A. Sansò)

29. (in preparation;  with Anna Giacalone Ramat) "From passive to impersonal. An Italian case study and its implications", to be included in a typological volume on impersonal constructions, edited by Andrej Malchukov & Anna Siewierska.

Reviews

1. (2002) Review of Bernd Kortmann & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (eds.), Cause, Condition, Concession, Contrast, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2000. Discourse Studies 4(1): 132-135.

2. (2002) Review of Igor Mel'chuk, Communicative Organization in Natural Language: The semantic-communicative structure of sentences, Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. Linguist List, issue 13.1852, July 3, 2002.

3. (2003) Review of Sophia S. Marmaridou, Pragmatic meaning and cognition, Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2000. Discourse Studies 5(3): 440-441.

4. (2003) Review of William Croft, Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.  Studies in Language 27(3): 671-682.

5. (2003) Review of Zygmunt Frajzyngier, and Traci S. Curl (eds.), Reflexives: Forms and Functions, Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins 2000. Archivio Glottologico Italiano, n.1, 2003, pp. 102-114.

6. (2004) Review of William Croft, Explaining Language Change. An Evolutionary Approach, London: Longman, 2002. [in Linguistics, 42(4): 867-872]

7. (2006) Recensione di M. Cysouw, The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking, Oxford, 2003. Archivio Glottologico Italiano XCI: 246-255.

8. (2007) "Review of: T. Kageyama & T. Tsunoda, Voice and Grammatical Relations. In honor of Masayoshi Shibatani, Amsterdam, 2006". Folia Linguistica 41 (3-4): 469-477.

9. (forthcoming) "Review of B. Lyngfelt & T. Solstad, Demoting the Agent. Passive, middle and other voice phenomena. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins". Archivio Glottologico Italiano.

Translations

 (2001) Translation (English --> Italian) of five papers included in the volume Le Radici Prime dell'Europa. Gli intrecci genetici, linguistici, storici a cura di Gianluca Bocchi e Mauro Ceruti. Milano, Bruno Mondadori.

(2002) Translation (English --> Italian) of eight papers included in the volume Le origini della scrittura, G.Bocchi & M. Ceruti (eds.), Milano, Bruno Mondadori.

Presentations/Talks

1. "A Frame-Based Discourse Semantics for the So-Called Manner-of-Motion Verbs"; 3rd International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilburg, The Netherlands, January 13-15, 1999.

2. "Towards a Compositional Frame Semantics" (A.Sansò, M. Nissim, C.Soria); 6th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, July 10-16, 1999.

3. "A Frame-based Discourse Semantics for Motion Verbs" poster; 6th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, July 10-16, 1999.

4. "Discarding Expectations When Building Bridges: the Need for a Revision Procedure" (M.Nissim, A.Sansò); VeXTAL, Venezia per il trattamento automatico delle lingue, Venice, Italy, November 22-24, 1999.

5. "The Domain of Demotion: a New View of Passives", poster presented at the 7th International Pragmatics Conference, Budapest, Hungary, July 9-14, 2000.

6. "Passive and Topicalization: beyond the common view", paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Functional Grammar, Madrid, Spain, September 20-23, 2000.

7. "Passive constructions in Italian and Spanish: a contrastive analysis", paper presented at the 2nd International Conference in Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics, Cambridge, UK, September 11-13, 2000.

8. "A new view of passives", paper presented at the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL 2000), Fresno, California State University, October 26-29, 2000.

9. "A network for the passive", poster, Chicago Linguistic Society 37 (April 2001), Chicago, University of Chicago.

10. "La diatesi passiva come categoria complessa: un’analisi contrastiva italiano-spagnolo". Paper presented at the XXXV Congresso internazionale di studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana (SLI). Paris, 20-22 September 2001.

11. "Toward a definition of the Mediterranean linguistic area" (P.Ramat & A. Sansò), paper presented at the Annual Conference of the North West Centre for Linguistics (NWCL), University of Manchester, England, November 22-23, 2002.

12. "Typological databases: A new approach", paper presented at the XVII International Congress of Linguists, Prague, Czech Republic, July 24-29, 2003.

13. "Semantic maps in action: Passive and impersonal constructions in some European languages", paper presented at the International Conference "Modelling thought and constructing meaning: cognitive models in interaction" Pavia, November 20-21, 2003.

14. "Per una definizione dell'area linguistica mediterranea" (P. Ramat & A. Sansò), paper presented at the International Conference Mediterraneo Plurilingue, Genova, Palazzo San Giorgio, 13-15 May 2004.

15. "MED-TYP: A Typological Database for Mediterranean Languages", paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal, 24-30 May 2004.

16. "Grammaticalization paths or prototype effects? A history of the reflexive passive/impersonal in Italian, paper presented at the International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3, Santiago de Compostela, 17-20 July 2005. (Workshop: "Prototypes and Grammaticalization: Grammaticalization as Prototype?", organized by Tanja Mortelmans and Torsten Leuschner).

17. (with A. Giacalone), "The demise of indefinite man constructions in European languages: An areal perspective", paper presented at the Workshop Aktuelle Fragen der Areallinguistik / Current Issues in Areal Typology, organized by Balthasar Bickel and Michael Cysouw (Bielefeld, February 2006).

18. (with A. Giacalone), "Latin homo as an indefinite element. A European areal perspective", paper presented at the Colloque La quantification en latin, organized by Michèle Fruyt (Centre Alfred Ernout, Sorbonne, Paris, June 2006).

19. (with C. Mauri and F. Da Milano), "Documenting variation across Europe. The Pavia Typological Database", poster presented at the XL congresso annuale della Società di Linguistica Italiana, Vercelli, September 2006.

20. "Su un caso di (mancata) grammaticalizzazione: aner e anthropos come elementi indefiniti/generici nella storia del greco", comunicazione presentata al VII Incontro Internazionale di Linguistica Greca, Cagliari, 13-15 settembre 2007. Download the hand-out.

21. (with C. Mauri), "Person/number and modality: a case of multifactorial dependency between grammatical systems", paper presented at the 7th Biennial Meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology, Paris, 25-28 September 2007. Download the hand-out.

22. "How semantic are semantic maps? A pilot study of passive and impersonal constructions in European languages", paper presented at the international workshop "Semantic maps: Methods and applications", Villejuif (CNRS - Centre André-Georges Haudricourt), 29 September 2007. Download the hand-out.

23. (with A. Giacalone Ramat) "Is there life after grammaticalization? The modal character of reflexive passives and impersonals". Paper presented at the 4th International conference on New Reflections on Grammaticalization (NRG4), Leuven, Belgium, 16-19 July 2008. 

24. (with C. Mauri) "The grammaticalization of directive modality". Paper presented at the 4th International conference on New Reflections on Grammaticalization (NRG4), Leuven, Belgium, 16-19 July 2008.

25. (with C. Mauri) "The reality status of directives and its coding across languages". Paper presented at Syntax of the world's languages III, Free University of Berlin, 25-28 September 2008.

26. (with C. Mauri) "The reality status of directives and its coding across languages"; "Typology and diachrony of irrealis. An overview of the IRR-TYP project"; invited talks, University of Zurich, Seminar fuer Sprachwissenschaft, 9-10 December 2008.

27. "Men, women, and birds. An embryonic system of noun classification in Ancient Greek". Paper presented at the 1st Transalpine Typology Meeting (University of Bern, 22-24 January 2009).

28. (with C. Mauri) "The diachrony of (ir)realis markers", paper accepted for presentation at the 19th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Nijmegen, 10-15 August 2009.

29. (with C. Mauri) "Irrealis and clause linkage", peper accepted for presentation at the 8th Annual Meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT 8), Berkeley, CA, 24-27 July 2009.