Dr. Luisa Seguin
/ luiza səgɛ̃ /
A photo of me at the École d'été 2025 in Saint-Nicolas with the statue of Jean-Baptiste Cerlogne, poet and linguist from Saint-Nicolas and one of the first to work on the Francoprovençal varieties spoken in Aosta Valley. Credits: Prof. Fabio Armand.
Email me at: luisa [dot] seguin [at] utoronto [dot] ca
OR lseguin9 [at] umd [dot] edu
I am a researcher working on Francoprovençal languages, associated with the Centre d'Études Francoprovençales in Saint-Nicolas (Aosta Valley, Italy) and the University of Toronto. In January 2026, I will start a 2-year postdoc at Université Côte d'Azur in Nice, where I will be working on questions in Romance with Dr. Lena Baunaz!
I hold a PhD from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, where I was advised by Maria Polinsky, Aron Hirsch, and Gary Thoms (NYU). I am interested in how structure (syntax) interacts with the other components of the grammar: meaning and sound. I am currently working on questions in an understudied Francoprovençal variety spoken in Aosta Valley (Italy), Valdôtain Patois (see my dissertation here). Other projects focus on exceptive and exclusive constructions (Except John/setting aside John, everyone came.), reflexive verbs (They wash themselves.). Finally, I am involved in #FPGlobal, a project led by Naomi Nagy (UofT) that aims to bring together speakers of Francoprovençal across Europe and North America, while creating a corpus of Francoprovençal varieties.
Before the PhD, I received my BA at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, where I worked on Quirky Subjects in Icelandic with Alessandra Giorgi, and an MA from the University of Amsterdam, where I investigated the meaning-form interface in various contact situations, such as creolization and diglossia, advised by Kees Hengeveld and Roland Pfau.
NEWS!
This fall, I will be a researcher at the Centre d'Études Francoprovençales in Saint-Nicolas (Aosta Valley, Italy). And in January 2026, I will start a 2-year postdoc at Université Côte d'Azur in Nice, where I will be working on intervention effects in Romance with Dr. Lena Baunaz!
My paper on The syntax and pragmatics of clause-internal wh-phrases in Valdôtain Patois just appeared in Linguistic Variation (online first): read it here!
I just filed the final version of my PhD dissertation, you can find it here!
This summer (July 7-11) I will be teaching at a summer school on Francoprovençal Languages and Cultures at the Centre d'Études Francoprovençales in the beautiful Saint-Nicolas (Italy)! ☺️
In the news!
In August 2025, the newspaper of Aosta Valley La Vallée Notizie published an article about my research on Francoprovençal!
In the picture on the top of the page, a view of the Alps back home. Courtesy of Charbonnier Mongolfiere.