Denis Delfitto, born in Felizzano, Italy, in 1962. Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics at Utrecht University. Currently affiliated to the Research Institute for Language and Speech at Utrecht University.
Fellow (1 February 1997 – 30 June 1997)
During the semester I spent at NIAS, I fully participated in the organisational and scientific activities of the research group “An Encyclopaedia of Syntactic Case Studies” (SynCom Group). I wrote down two of the case studies that will be part of the encyclopaedia, namely Adverb Classes and Adverb Placement and Bare Plurals. The first case aims at an overview of the major empirical and theoretical achievements of formal linguistics within the (relatively neglected) domain of adverbial syntax, whereas the latter discusses some core properties of the syntax-semantics interface on the grounds of an in-depth analysis of the distributional and interpretive properties of determinerless nouns. I also worked at an original contribution (Aspect, Genericity and Bare Plurals) concerning the interplay between aspectual morphology (especially the perfective/imperfective opposition as attested in Slavic and Romance) and the generic interpretation of sentences and noun phrases, arguing in favour of a non-quantificational approach to genericity, which assigns a central role to the notions of Aspect and Predication. I had the opportunity to present and discuss my work in the course of the two international workshops organised by the SynCom Group at the end of each semester (in January and June), which have led to a better assessment of the role that the project of the encyclopaedia might play in illustrating the empirical achievements of formal linguistics to a large public of students and scholars in linguistics and related fields.