Roberto Zamparelli

After a PhD in Rochester, N.Y. and a Marie Curie postdoc in Edinburgh, Roberto Zamparelli has worked in Italy, first at the University of Bergamo, then in Trento, where he was a founding member of CIMEC (Interdepartmental Center for Mind and Brain Sciences, University of Trento). Zamparelli started his career as a theoretical linguist working on the syntax/semantics interface of nominal structures, developing a theory that combined DP cartography with compositional semantics ("Layers in the DP", 2000). With prof. C. Heycock, he looked at the syntax and semantics of (bare) noun coordinations; in other collaborations, he wrote papers on the count-mass distinction, NP pro-forms and partitivity. Since 2010 he has been interested in computational linguistics and its connections with formal semantics ("Frege in Space" 2014, with Marco Baroni and Raffaella Bernardi) and on the use of artificial neural networks to probe the innatism/empiricism debate (joint work with Cristiano Chesi, Shammur Chowdhury and others). More recently, he has worked on games for teaching linguistics structures to a broader audience, or to collect and validate data on the prosody-semantics mapping. His current project uses ERP to analyze the difference between listening to sentences and mentally composing them.