Speaker: Emanuele Bernardi

I am Emanuele Bernardi, I graduated at the Università degli Studi di Torino with a Master's Degree in Linguistic Sciences. My main interest is to make critical reflections on the ways of theorising syntax. This led me to compare some formalist and functionalist approaches in my MA thesis, but instead of pursuing a pure metatheoretic cross-comparison, I tried to test the frameworks by confronting how they analyse a common empirical topic, i.e. J. Greenberg's Universal 20. The results I obtained are really encouraging: on the one side I noticed that it is actually possible to find some insights to which various approaches agree independently from one another, and on the other side the tentative explanation I give in order to comprehensively explain U20 raises new interesting questions, whose answers are matter of future researches.

Apart from the specific topic of my MA thesis, I am more generally interested in linguistics and communication. Before my Master's Degree I obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Cultures and Literatures of the Modern World in Turin, through which I had the chance to deepen my knowledge about the Italian, English, German, and Latin literatures, plus an introductory course to the Arabic language.