Alessia Cassarà

I am a Post-doctoral researcher at the Institut für Linguistik/Romanistik at the University of Stuttgart.  My field of research is Romance linguistics with a focus on language variation and change.  I am fascinated by the cognitive mechanisms that regulate the survival of one linguistic form rather than the other (e.g. language economy, cognitive efficiency, etc.). To conduct my research, I combine methods from corpus linguistics with methods from experimental linguistics (e.g. structural priming). Currently, I'm working in the SILPAC  project (DFG-Research Unit FOR 5157), where I investigate how differences in the input affect both the acquisition and the diachronic change of specific verbal structures in French and Italian (Project H2 PI: Prof. Dr. Achim Stein).  I have previously worked in the CRC 1252 "Prominence in Language" and I have completed my PhD at Department of Romance Studies at the University of Cologne. In my dissertation, I have investigated the interface between information structure and syntax  from a comparative perspective in French and Spanish. I also have an interest in Sociolinguistics, especially with respect to minority languages. I've conducted several fieldworks, collecting  data for Catalonian Spanish, Sicilian and different Kurdish dialects spoken in Iran.

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