Giorgio Magri

I studied philosophy and then mathematics at the University of Milano. I got my PhD in Linguistics at MIT in 2009. Since 2012, I am a permanent researcher at the French CNRS, affiliated with the lab SFL in Paris. 

My research is framed within generative linguistics. Its core idea is that, to understand languages, we need to understand the formal grammars that generate them: what are the mathematical properties of those grammars? what are the algorithmic implications of those properties? 

My curriculum vitae contains links to all my work (papers, manuscripts, handouts). So far, I have worked on four topics:

• During graduate school, I have focused on natural language semantics, trying to derive complex patterns of meaning from only a few assumptions on the grammars that compute those meanings (here is a paper from that period). 

• Towards the end of graduate school, my research interests have shifted to sound patterns, trying to distill the implications of different theories of phonology for learnability and acquisition (here is a representative paper). 

• More recently, I have been working on typological analysis in probabilistic phonology: what are the organizing principles of the typologies of probabilistic grammars predicted by various formalisms? (A forthcoming monograph with Arto Anttila will summarize some of our results). 

• Another recent project tries to reduce the various frameworks of categorical and probabilistic constraint-based phonology to axioms of phonological behavior that distill the crucial assumption made by each framework (here is a representative paper).

I can be contacted by email at magrigrg@gmail.com. My office in Paris is room 134 at 59 rue Pouchet.