Ioanna Sitaridou
University of Cambridge, Spanish and Portuguese, Faculty Member
- Ioanna Sitaridou is Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at th... moreIoanna Sitaridou is Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, Director of Studies in Linguistics and Modern and Medieval Languages and Tutor at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
Prior to her Cambridge appointment in 2004 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg, investigating word order in Old Romance and the licensing/loss of null subjects in the history of French (2002-2005), alongside Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c Jürgen Meisel.
She received her PhD in Romance linguistics at the University of Manchester (2002) under the supervision of Prof. Nigel Vincent. She holds an MA in Linguistics from University College London (UCL) (1998). She also holds a BA in French Philology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1997), part of which was spent under the Erasmus scheme at the University of Lisbon (1997) studying Portuguese and Romance linguistics.
Her main areas of research are comparative and diachronic syntax of the Romance languages, in particular 13th Century and dialectal Spanish, and also dialectal Greek, especially Pontic Greek and Cypriot Greek. The areas in which she carries out research are: the relationship between syntactic change and acquisition, language contact, micro-variation, and phylogenies.
Her research has been funded twice by British Academy (#SRG-102639; #SRG 48312) and several times by the University of Cambridge (Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme 2014; Newton Trust Small Research Grant 2010; Early Career Fellowship by CRASSH in 2008). In Lent 2012, she received a research buyout by the research project ‘Information Structure and Word Order Change in Germanic and Romance Languages’ (ISWOC), at the University of Oslo.
She has published several papers in Lingua, Diachronica, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, among others, and her book on Word Order in Old Ibero-Romance (with Prof. Montserrat Batllori) will appear by CUP in 2018.
Her work on Romeyka has featured in national and international media (the Today programme in BBC Radio 4, The Independent, Der Spiegel, Sabah, etc.); as REF Impact case-study; attracted a TEDxAthens (2015) invitation and more than 300,000 views for her University video and website. She uses this research and the resulting publicity to educate on bilingualism, promote linguistic self-esteem, especially for female speakers in remote areas of Turkey, and ultimately to revitalize it. For her research on Romeyka she was awarded the Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies by Princeton University in Spring 2011 and a Research Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University in Winter 2015.edit - Prof. Nigel Vincentedit
In this article, we investigate the diachronic developments that gave rise to final auxiliaries-a hallmark of head-final syntax-in Asia Minor Greek, a cluster of Greek varieties originally spoken in the area historically known as Asia... more
In this article, we investigate the diachronic developments that gave rise to final auxiliaries-a hallmark of head-final syntax-in Asia Minor Greek, a cluster of Greek varieties originally spoken in the area historically known as Asia Minor (present-day Anatolia, Turkey) within the recent developments of the generative framework, i.e., the minimalist program. We propose that the original source for the final auxiliaries in Asia Minor Greek is to be found in Hellenistic Greek conditionals, whereas it can be traced back to Medieval Greek pluperfects. The role of contact with Anatolian Turkish is limited to rendering the available-albeit pragmatically marked-Verb-Auxiliary as the only available order. Importantly, this bottom-up change did not switch Asia Minor Greek from harmonic head-initial to harmonic head-final, but, rather, made it a mixed-directionality language. In minimalist terms, we propose that attrition, one of the ways that language contact manifests itself, targets SEM-uninterpretable features; from this point onwards contact may or may not ensue depending on the feature (mis)match between the two languages.
Research Interests:
This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of... more
This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, firstgeneration immigrants, heritage speakers, and L2 speakers, were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011; 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were found to be mostly felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.
Research Interests:
A correlation between articles and Case has long been noted based on diachronic evidence. Beyond articles, evidence supports that this correlation extends further to clitics and the determiner system (the D-system) at large. The... more
A correlation between articles and Case has long been noted based on
diachronic evidence. Beyond articles, evidence supports that this correlation extends
further to clitics and the determiner system (the D-system) at large. The D-system in turn
supports referential functions in grammar and is closely correlated to Person. The aim of
the present article is to link support for these facts to the broader foundational question
and independent recent theories of the function of Case as governing referential meaning
in grammar at the level of clauses. This link is supported by specific evidence from the
use of Accusative and Partitive clitics in Romance, which play the same roles strong
Accusative vs. weak Partitive Case play in Finnish, which lacks articles, and similar
patterns in languages such as Turkish, Russian, and Latin. Case therefore arguably
determines the referential function of (pro-)nominals as part of event structures, whether
synthetically or else analytically via the left periphery of the NP. This explains the
historical links between Case and the D-system, which we further argue evidence from
Greek has been incorrectly argued to contravene.
diachronic evidence. Beyond articles, evidence supports that this correlation extends
further to clitics and the determiner system (the D-system) at large. The D-system in turn
supports referential functions in grammar and is closely correlated to Person. The aim of
the present article is to link support for these facts to the broader foundational question
and independent recent theories of the function of Case as governing referential meaning
in grammar at the level of clauses. This link is supported by specific evidence from the
use of Accusative and Partitive clitics in Romance, which play the same roles strong
Accusative vs. weak Partitive Case play in Finnish, which lacks articles, and similar
patterns in languages such as Turkish, Russian, and Latin. Case therefore arguably
determines the referential function of (pro-)nominals as part of event structures, whether
synthetically or else analytically via the left periphery of the NP. This explains the
historical links between Case and the D-system, which we further argue evidence from
Greek has been incorrectly argued to contravene.
The article focuses on a cross-genre study of fronting phenomena in 13 th Century Old Spanish. In particular, we study stage topics and deictic fronting, fronting in quotative inversion, quan-tifier fronting and information/broad/weak... more
The article focuses on a cross-genre study of fronting phenomena in 13 th Century Old Spanish. In particular, we study stage topics and deictic fronting, fronting in quotative inversion, quan-tifier fronting and information/broad/weak focus fronting comparatively, for the first time, in three types of texts (that is, (a) Cantar de Mío Cid, (b) La Fazienda de Ultra Mar, and (c) Estoria de España and General Estoria) while we compare with equivalent judgements from Modern Spanish in order to establish what exactly has changed. "Fronting" a term which has been used to describe all sorts of configurations ranging from stylistic fronting to focus fronting to non-focus fronting receives here a principled discussion. We show that, overall, fronting with a verum focus interpretation has largely been preserved into Modern Spanish, albeit often restricted, while the most notable change seems to be the loss of a preverbal focus position conveying broad focus. In doing so, we reconcile Leonetti's (2017) claims for an informational partition, which does not divide the fronted element from the verb, but, rather, the fronted element together with the verb from the postverbal subject with our own claims about the syntactic mechanisms which yield this partition. We proceed to conclude that fronting operations are not a derivative of the V2 parameter being operative (contra Wolfe 2015).
In this article, using rich data from 13th C. Spanish, it is argued that Old Spanish does not belong to any known V2 type of language, even the most flexible/relaxed attested type-the latter defined as mandatory verb movement from... more
In this article, using rich data from 13th C. Spanish, it is argued that Old Spanish does not belong to any known V2 type of language, even the most flexible/relaxed attested type-the latter defined as mandatory verb movement from T-to-Fin/Force without the necessary raising of an XP to the preverbal field (as is the case in prototypical V2 languages such as German); neither does it constitute a new one for lack of evidence for formal movement of the verb to a C-related head. Instead, it is claimed that V2 effects in Old Spanish are due either because (i) verb movement is associated with some discourse effect or polarity; or, (ii) it is simply linear V2. Such V2 effects are trivially found in non-V2 languages and may also relate to rhetorical schemata and the discourse tradition.