Dr Chiara Cappellaro

Biography

I graduated in Translation Studies at the University of Trieste (Italy), and I went on to an MPhil and DPhil in Linguistics at the University of Oxford. Before taking up the position of Research Fellow in Linguistics I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at St John’s College, and previously a Research Assistant on the Leverhulme-funded project ‘The Romance Noun: A Comparative-Historical Study of Plural Formation’ also at Oxford.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in theoretical and applied areas of linguistics, in particular inflexional morphology (which I investigate on the basis of empirical evidence from the Romance languages) and aspects of multilingualism such as the inherited intelligibility across cognate languages, and the role that exposure to a Romance language can play in the recognition of English words of Latinate origin for native speakers of English.

I am also currently completing a monograph based on my doctoral and postdoctoral research which examined the inflexional paradigm structure of Romance personal pronouns in synchrony and diachrony. The monograph is meant to fill a serious gap in the descriptive literature on Romance linguistics, but will also have deeper theoretical implications, especially for morphological theory – by exploring the irregular phenomenon labelled ‘overabundance’, whereby one cell in a paradigm is filled by more than one inflected form, as in the case of the two English past tense forms burned / burnt.

My teaching expertise is in General Linguistics, Morphology, Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Romance Linguistics and Dialectology (in particular Italo-Romance).