Dr Norma Schifano

Norma Schifano’s research focuses on documenting and theorizing morphosyntactic change and variation in Romance, with a particular focus on language contact, both diachronically and synchronically. Recently she has also become interested in ethical challenges and opportunities raised by collaborations between academics and third-sector organizations representing linguistic minorities.

Her first monograph (Verb Movement in Romance, Oxford University Press, 2018) challenges how word order variations in verb placement across Romance have been traditionally analysed and develops a principled morphosyntactic account which successfully predicts the great wealth of microvariation attested within this language family. Taking this work as a point of departure, she has extended her investigations to examine correlations between verb movement and seemingly unrelated morphosyntactic phenomena across a wide range of early and modern Romance (non-)standard varieties, resulting in numerous co-authored publications with Adam Ledgeway (Università degli Studi di Bergamo). 

Since working as an RA on the Leverhulme-funded project Fading Voices in Southern Italy (2015-2019, Cambridge) her research has explored a wealth of contact-induced morphosyntactic phenomena in the highly endangered Italo-Greek varieties of southern Italy. This decade-long investigation, resulting in numerous publications with Adam Ledgeway (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) and Giuseppina Silvestri (UCLA), has culminated in a new co-authored monograph (Greek-Romance Language Contact in Southern Italy: documentation and theory, forthcoming, Oxford University Press). 

Beyond Italy, her 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).

In 2017 Norma co-founded the Linguistics@InMFL Project with Michelle Sheehan (Newcastle University). This is now 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 the UK curriculum. Along with the team, she has published extensively in pedagogical 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.