Speakers

Giuseppe Longobardi is a distinguished linguist and academic, whose research encompasses theoretical, comparative, and historical syntax, with a particular focus on Romance, Germanic, and Classical languages; its main domains are parameter theory, the syntax/reference interface, diachronic and phylogenetic linguistics, and the intersection of linguistics with population genetics. He is renowned for developing the Parametric Comparison Method, which integrates generative grammatical principles with analytic philosophy and historical-comparative explanations. He served as the Principal Investigator of the large interdisciplinary ERC Advanced Grant 'Meeting Darwin's Last Challenge' (2012-2018) at the University of York.

In the course of his career, Prof. Longobardi has held various academic positions, including Assistant Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore (1981–1987), Associate Professor at the University of Venice (1987–1994), and Professor at the University of Trieste (1997–2017). In 2012, he became Anniversary Professor at the University of York (UK).

Prof. Longobardi has been recognized with several honours, including being elected a member of the Academia Europaea in 2022. He has also held visiting positions at institutions such as MIT, UCLA, CNRS Paris, and Harvard University. 

His numerous publications include “The Syntax of Noun Phrases: Configuration, Parameters and Empty Categories” (1991) and “Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory” (2009). 

Dr. Paola Crisma is a linguist affiliated with the University of Trieste, where she holds a teaching position in the Department of Humanities.  Her research focuses on historical syntax and linguistic theory. She has co-edited the volume “Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory” with Giuseppe Longobardi, published by Oxford University Press in 2009.  Additionally, Dr. Crisma has contributed to studies on Middle English phonology, including a quantitative analysis of h-loss. She has been a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she collaborated with Kenneth Wexler.

Dr Dimitar Kazakov is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Computer Science at the University of York. His research interests encompass Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics, and the Evolution of Language. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and supervised 12 PhD students to completion. He is currently leading a team of 4 PhD students. Dr Kazakov is a former Vice-Chair of the UK Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB). His publications include "The origins of syntax: from navigation to language" (2005), "Evolutionary pressures promoting complexity in navigation and communication" (2013), and "Learning implicational models of universal grammar parameters" (2018).

Sena Karachanak-Yankova, PhD is Associate Professor at the Department of Genetics, Biological Faculty, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Medical Genetics, Medical Faculty, Medical University-Sofia, Bulgaria. 

Sena Karachanak-Yankova’s PhD research was focused on the first characterization of the uniparental structure of the contemporary Bulgarian gene pool, and her later work remained in the field of population genetics and genomics involving larger-scale studies of modern and ancient populations. In recent years, Sena Karachanak-Yankova’s research activity is mainly directed towards unraveling the genetic and genomic determinants of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia in the Bulgarian population. 

Sena Karachanak-Yankova is member of the Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium as well as the Bulgarian Society of Human Genetics and Genomic and the European Society of Human Genetics.

The publication record of Sena Karachanak-Yankova includes more than 50 peer-reviewed papers in population genetics and genomics and the study of the heritability of the common disorders of the brain. 

Cristina Guardiano is Full Professor of Linguistics at Unimore. She studied Classics and Linguistics at Pisa, earning a PhD in historical syntax on Ancient Greek nominal structures. Her research spans formal and quantitative linguistics, crosslinguistic comparison, language change, phylogenetic reconstruction, and gene-language comparison. An expert on parametric analysis of nominal phrases and syntactic variation in Greek and Romance, she has co-developed the Parametric Comparison Method with Giuseppe Longobardi since 2001. A Fulbright alumna (UCLA, 2013-14), she was chief research associate of ERC LANGELIN and coordinates Unimore units in PRIN projects. She is part of SSWL and TerraLing, contributing as property author, language expert, and board member. She has held visiting roles at York, Hannover, Cambridge, UCLA, UPenn, Thessaloniki, and Patras. Her publications appear in top journals and handbooks in linguistics and anthropology. Active in PhD teaching and supervision, she organises numerous conferences and workshops. She reviews widely and serves on editorial and evaluation committees, including for l’Italia Dialettale and FWO.