Projects

Since 2014, I have been interested in the cross-linguistic diversity of pluractional markers (PMs) in the world's languages. Pluractionality is the morphological expression of the plurality of the situation (states and events) expressed by the verb (also known as verbal number, see Corbett 2000: 243-264). I studied this phenomenon in its functional and formal aspects. I proposed a description of its cross-linguistic variety, also adopting the semantic map model to account for its wide functional domain (see Mattiola 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021). I'm also interested in investigating PMs in specific languages and language families (see Mattiola & Gildea 2023).   

I'm now investigating the historical sources of PMs both in large-scale cross-linguistic perspective (with Chiara Zanchi) and in Indigenous languages of South America (with Olga Krasnoukhova). The final aim is to provide a comprehensive diachronic typology of PMs through a source-oriented typological perspective (see Cristofaro 2019).

My more recent work is dedicated to the study of reduplicative patterns in the world's languages. Reduplication consists of a formal repetition (it might involve both the morphological and the syntactic levels) conveying a modification in the semantics of the base (grammatical, pragmatic, and/or lexical). The peculiarity of reduplication is its presumptive iconic nature (some kind of mirroring between form and function).

I investigated some specific patterns both in cross-linguistic (see Mattiola & Masini 2022 and Mattiola & Barotto 2023) and language-specific (see Masini & Mattiola 2022) perspectives, also focusing on cognitive and iconic motivations (see Mattiola & Barotto 2023).

I'm now working on thorough descriptions of reduplicative patterns in specific areas of the world and language families which display a lot of them (e.g., Pacific Northwest Coast, Eastern Africa, Oceanic languages), but also a large-scale comprehensive account of reduplication.

Since 2020, I have been interested in methodological issues concerning typological research. More specifically, I focus my work on the concept of data in typology and how these impact cross-linguistic investigations (discourse-sensitive typology, see Mattiola 2020), but also I focus on how to have the widest range of information (converging evidence, see Masini & Mattiola 2019). Lately, I'm also interested in language sampling.

Since July 2024, I have been a member of the PRIN Project Verbs' constructional patterns across languages: a multi-dimensional investigation led by Silvia Luraghi and Michela Cennamo. My aim within this project is to add the alternation classes to all the alternation constructions of modern languages found in the PaVeDa and typologizing the data (i.e., making them consistent and comparable).

I used to work with Andrea Sansò on denominal verb formation strategies (> DVFSs, also known as verbalizers) in a large-scale cross-linguistic perspective. We proposed a comprehensive diachronic typology of such strategies (see Mattiola & Sansò 2024). We also worked on the diachronic relationship between DVFSs and the voice domain (in particular anticausative strategies, see Mattiola & Sansò Accepted).

In 2017, I was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the LILEC department of Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna in the project UniveraLIST- List constructions in typological and cognitive perspective led by Francesca Masini. Listing patterns are "the syntagmatic concatenation of two or more units of the same type (i.e. potentially paradigmatically connected) that are on a par with each other, thus filling one and the same slot within the larger construction they are part of" (Masini et al. 2018: 50). Under this label, several different phenomena can be comprised under this label, ranging from coordination and repetition to co-compounding and (full) reduplication. My objective within the project was to collect data on listing patterns from a balanced variety sample (223 languages). Since lists are thought to manifest themselves at different levels (from morphology to syntax and discourse), their typological study raised theoretical and methodological issues. Indeed, from a practical point of view, lists are far from being simple to find in descriptive grammars. For this reason, doing typology in the traditional way turns out to be quite hard. Consequently, we proposed a new methodology for bringing out the data based on a three-level study allowing both a horizontal and a vertical investigation. From this project, we published a database of listing patterns which we are finishing to populate (see https://www.listtyp.it/).

Alongside this project, I also started being interested in the typological investigation of discourse phenomena (see Barotto & Mattiola eds. 2023), such as general extenders.