Norma Schifano is Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Romance Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Churchill College. She is also a member of the Council of the Philological Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Norma’s research focuses on documenting and theorizing morphosyntactic change and variation in Romance, with a particular focus on language contact, both diachronically and synchronically, especially among linguistic minorities and migrant communities. Recently she has also become interested in ethical challenges and opportunities raised by collaborations between academics and third-sector organizations representing linguistic minorities. In 2017 she co-founded the Linguistics@InMFL Project, a multi-institutional collaborative project which aims to investigate and provide evidence for the viability of including linguistics as an element of MFL teaching in UK secondary schools. Along with the team, she has published extensively in pedagogical linguistics. Norma is also the principal editor of Gateways to Language and Linguistics (with Alice Corr, Anna Havinga, Jonathan Kasstan, Sascha Stollhans and Michelle Sheehan), a new series to be published by Routledge providing beginners with practical introductions to foundational topics in linguistics.
Norma completed a BA in Modern Languages and Language Sciences at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2009), where she remained for a MA in Language Sciences (2011). In 2015 she completed a PhD in Italian at Clare College, Cambridge. Before taking up her current post, she worked at the Universities of Oxford, Manchester and Birmingham.
What is the main aim of your research and what key questions or issues does it address? How does this year's symposium theme, "Language and communication across boundaries" relate to your research?
The main aim of my core research is documenting and understanding grammatical change and variation within the Romance languages, that is, the descendants of Latin.
My first monograph (Verb Movement in Romance: A Comparative Study, Oxford University Press, 2018) challenges how some variations in the placement of the verb within the sentence across Romance have been traditionally analysed and develops a principled grammatical account which successfully predicts the great wealth of microvariation attested within this language family. Taking this work as a point of departure, I have extended my investigations to examine correlations between verb placement and seemingly unrelated grammatical phenomena across a wide range of early and modern Romance varieties, including non-standard ones. For example, in Negation and Verb-Movement in Romance: New Perspectives of Jespersen’s Cycle (2023, Probus), I worked with Adam Ledgeway (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) to uncover a previously unknown correlation between the position of the verb in the sentence and the use of negators after the verb in Romance languages.
Since working as a Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded project Fading Voices in Southern Italy (2015-2019, University of Cambridge), my research has also explored a wealth of contact-induced grammatical phenomena in the highly endangered Italo-Greek varieties of southern Italy. This decade-long investigation, resulting in numerous publications with Adam Ledgeway and Giuseppina Silvestri (UCLA), has culminated in a new co-authored monograph (Greek-Romance Language Contact in Southern Italy: Documentation and Theory, in press, Oxford University Press) where we investigate the nature of the grammatical changes triggered by centuries of contact between Italo-Greek and the neighbouring Romance dialects.
Beyond Italy, my endeavours to document and analyse language contact in linguistic minorities have extended to the largely overlooked Latin American community in the UK, leading a pilot project funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2022-2025, University of Birmingham). Some of the main results include the differing effects that exposure to English and to peninsular Spanish can have on the way in which first-generation Ecuadorians living in the UK use the present perfect. I am also very pleased to have brought together a group of experts on language contact in Romance, who are currently writing contributing chapters to a new volume that I am co-editing with Adam Ledgeway (Syntactic Variation and Change: Case Studies from the Romance Languages, in prep., Oxford University Press).
My ongoing interest in grammatical change resulting from contact between languages has recently led me to explore this type of mechanism drawing on early written sources translated from other languages. For example, at the moment I am examining the prose works of Brunetto Latini (Florence, c. 1220-c. 1294), including his Rettorica, his Tresor and his translations of three orations by Cicero. What makes Brunetto’s case study particularly noteworthy is that, while Rettorica and Cicero’s translated orations were written in early Tuscan, his native language, Tresor was written in early French during the author’s exile across the Alps, and then translated back into early Tuscan (with a fascinating debate surrounding the identity of the translators) and other early Romance varieties, including Spanish, Aragonese, Catalan and southern Italian varieties. This is giving me the extraordinary opportunity to investigate not only patterns of verb placement in early Tuscan and French (with potential interference from Latin syntax), but also to assess how these patterns behaved under the pressure of translation into related but different Romance varieties, with often similar but by means not identical grammatical rules. This is the topic that more closely relates to this year’s Symposium theme, “Language and communication across boundaries”. Indeed, the use of early French by Tuscan writers (Brunetto Latini being just one example) was a means of crossing boundaries of their time. These translations not only enabled communication and connections across social, cultural and geographic divides, a key concern of this year’s Symposium, but by doing so they also shaped the languages themselves, in ways that are still largely understudied.
What does your research involve you actually doing on a daily basis, and where do you typically carry out your work?
A significant part of my day-to-day research involves collecting linguistic data. This can take very different forms depending on the project I’m working on, ranging from in-person fieldwork, as in my work on Italo-Greek, which involved six months in southern Italy, to online experimental tasks, as in my research on Ecuadorian Spanish in the UK. For my current work on early Tuscan, I am compiling my own annotated corpus, manually extracting sentences from printed editions and combining these with data from online corpora. Once I have collected a substantial body of data, I analyse it and use the results as the basis for talks and publications.
On a less regular basis, but still as a significant part of my work, my research also involves direct engagement with communities, such as the three participatory workshops I delivered in London in 2023 aimed at the local Latinx community in relation to some of their linguistic attitudes and practices, in collaboration with my project partner Latin American House, a London-based charity supporting low-income Latin American people in the UK. As part of my Linguistics @InMFL Project, I also deliver activities with an educational focus, including CPD courses for secondary school MFL teachers and PGCE students.
What outcomes or contributions do you hope your research will lead to in the future?
I hope my work with migrant communities and linguistic minorities will promote and inspire positive attitudes towards linguistic practices such as bilingualism and code-switching. I also hope it will inspire further collaborations between the academia and third-sector organizations representing minorities, as well as encouraging co-authorship of outputs between representatives of linguistic communities and academics.
I hope my work with Linguistics@InMFL will contribute to promoting a more engaging and inclusive approach to the study of languages and will enthuse more students to take up this subject. I also hope it will persuade relevant stakeholders, including the Department for Education, that linguistics should be incorporated in the teaching of MFL as a meaningful step towards increasing uptake among a more diverse range of students.
I hope my work on translated works in the Middle Ages will inspire syntacticians working on early stages of languages to collaborate more closely with philologists. There is a wealth of grammatical variation in medieval manuscripts which has largely gone unnoticed in formal syntax studies, partly because many of the editions traditionally consulted by formal syntacticians gloss over variants which might of interest from a syntactic perspective. Relatedly, a significant proportion of medieval works are (partial) translations or readaptations of previous works. I hope my work will inspire further researchers to pay close attention to potential syntactic interference from the original sources as an additional source for syntactic evidence.
What aspect of your work is most exciting to you right now?
As far as my work on language contact is concerned, I’m particularly excited about a new collaboration to extend my research on first-generation Ecuadorian speakers in the UK to the corresponding community in northern Italy. On the historical side, I’m excited by the possibility of exploring syntactic variation and interference across a wider range of translated medieval texts. As far as my work in pedagogical linguistics is concerned, I’m currently co-creating new materials with secondary school teachers to introduce linguistics to Key Stage 3 pupils studying Spanish. This is part of a new funding bid I’m developing with the Linguistics@InMFL team to develop and deliver a intervention in schools specifically targeting pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are much less likely to continue studying languages beyond Key Stage 3.