Alessia Cassarà

I am a Junior Professor at the Institute of Romance Languages of the University of Tübingen. My field of research is Romance linguistics (Italian, French, Spanish) 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. elicitation tasks, structural priming). 

I have worked as a post-doctoral researcher within the  SILPAC  project (DFG-Research Unit FOR 5157,  Institut für Linguistik/Romanistik, University of Stuttgart), where I investigated how differences in the input affect both the acquisition and the diachronic change of anticausative structures in French and Italian (Project H2 PI: Prof. Dr. Achim Stein).

 I have previously worked in the SFB 1252 "Prominence in Language" and I completed my PhD at Department of Romance Studies at the University of Cologne. In my dissertation, I 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 and dialectology. I've conducted several fieldworks, collecting  data for Catalonian Spanish, Sicilian and different Kurdish dialects spoken in Iran.

Currently, I am investigating contact-induced language change in French-Italian bilinguals (see Project BIANC under "Research").

You can find my complete CV in the top menu bar.