Dr. Norma Schifano

Biography

Norma Schifano's research focuses on documenting and theorizing morphosyntactic change and variation in Romance languages, with a particular emphasis on language contact, both diachronically and synchronically. She has become interested in the ethical challenges and opportunities raised by collaborations with academics and third-sector organizations that represent linguistic minorities. Her monograph, 'Verb Movement in Romance', published by Oxford University Press in 2018, challenges traditional analyses of word order variations in verb placement in Romance languages and develops a principled morphosyntactic account that successfully predicts the microvariation observed across this language family. Building on her previous work, she has extended investigations to examine correlations between verb movement and other seemingly unrelated morphosyntactic phenomena across a wide range of early modern Romance and (non-)standard varieties, resulting in numerous co-authored publications with Adam Ledgeway from the Università degli Studi di Bergamo. Schifano also worked on the Leverhulme-funded project 'Fading Voices of Southern Italy' (2015-2019), which explored contact-induced morphosyntactic phenomena in the endangered Italo-Greek varieties of Southern Italy, leading to a new co-authored monograph forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Her current projects include a pilot study examining the linguistic documentation of the largely overlooked Latin American community in the UK, funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.

Research Interests

Experience