Main areas of research expertise: morphology, historical linguistics, Italian and Romance linguistics, bi-/multilingualism, and psycholinguistics.
I have published in major peer-reviewed journals for Italian and Romance Linguistics (Revue Romane, Archivio Glottologico Italiano, Italian Journal of Linguistics), and OUP/CUP edited volumes on the structure of the Romance Languages (2016, 2022). I have also presented at numerous international conferences and workshops, and given invited papers, for example, at the University of Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and the Free University of Berlin.
My work has contributed significantly to the development of the notion of overabundance in morphology (2013, 2018) and to general understanding of the grammaticalization of Romance tonic third-person pronouns (2017, 2020) culminating in a monograph that is under contract in the British Academy Monograph Series.
My research on number- and gender-marking in Italo-Romance is original and influential. The identification of a unique type of genus alternans in a Calabrian dialect (2015), on which I also based a Knowledge-Exchange project which was much appreciated by the local community, has been quoted and discussed in recent authoritative work on gender-systems in Romance.
My research interests have broadened in recent years to include bi-/multilingualism and psycholinguistics. With colleagues at the Oxford Language & Brain Laboratory I conducted behavioural experiments on the processing of cognate Romance words to investigate mutual intercomprehension between Italian and Romanian within the AHRC-funded Creative Multilingualism project (2021). My interest in psycholinguistic experimentation led me to start an interdisciplinary programme of research that combines diachronic and experimental evidence to investigate a controversial notion in morphological theory, that of the morphome (an autonomously morphological structure which is not dependent on phonology or syntax), and particularly the problem of its cognitive reality. I carried out a pilot study on morphomic structures in Italian with colleagues at the Language & Brain Laboratory, now published in the journal Morphology (2024), and I am currently leading (with Martin Maiden) the Morphome Project to continue this ambitious plan of research including more advanced neurolinguistic methodologies (EEG) and testing further Romance languages in both native and proficient bilingual (English L1) speakers.
2024: Cappellaro, Dumrukcic, Fritz, Franzon and Maiden. ‘The Cognitive Reality of Morphomes: Evidence from Italian’. Morphology. 34. 33-71.
2022: Cappellaro and Meinschaefer. ‘Inflectional morphology vs derivational morphology vs compounding’. In Ledgeway, A. and Maiden, M. (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 400-433.
2021: Cappellaro and Maiden. ‘Inferenza interlinguistica e intercomprensione nella Romània: sul ruolo della morfologia flessiva’. In Schøsler, L. and Härmä, J. (eds) Actes du XXIXe Congrès international de linguistique et philologie romanes. Strasbourg: ELIPHI. 1443-1454.
2020: Cappellaro. ‘Pronominal variation and layers in grammaticalization: The enclitic forms -ello and -lo in the Italo-Romance dialect of Lizzano in Belvedere’. Italian Journal of Linguistics 32.2. 33-58.
2018: Cappellaro. ‘Genesis and Persistence of Overbundance: Data from Romance Languages’. In Dammel, A., Eitelmann, M. and Schmuck, M. Reorganising Grammatical Variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. SCLS 203. 119-149.
2017: Cappellaro. ‘The Semantic Specialization of Esso as [–Human] in Standard Italian’. Revue Romane. 52.2. 113-136.
2016: Cappellaro. ‘Tonic personal pronouns: morphophonology’. In Ledgeway, A. and Maiden, M. The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 722-741.
2015: Cappellaro. ‘Plurality and gender in a central Calabrian dialect. The emergence of an innovative type of Romance Genus Alternansin Bocchiglierese’. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 2/2015. 208-231.
2013: Cappellaro. ‘Overabundance in diachrony: a case study’. In Cruschina, S. et al. (eds). The Boundaries of Pure Morphology. Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 209-220.