Raffaella Zanuttini

PhD in Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania (1991)

Raffaella Zanuttini’s research focuses on comparative syntax and examines both languages that are vastly different from one another (like English, Italian and Korean) and varieties that are minimally different (like the so called `dialects’ of Italy and the US), with the goal of understanding the limits of grammatical variation. She has worked extensively on the range and limits of variation in the syntactic expression of negation. She has also investigated the notion of clause type at the syntax/semantics interface, focusing in particular on exclamatives and imperative clauses.  More recently, she has been investigating how the relation between speaker and addressee is encoded in the syntax. Her interest in comparing minimally different languages has led her to co-found (with Larry Horn) the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, a research group whose goal is to document and analyse syntactic variation in North American English.