Canada supports work on Arpitan by Masha and Luisa

Studying variation in the subject clitics in Francoprovençal languages.

Congratulations to our Professor Emerita Masha Polinsky and recent alumna Luisa Seguin *25, who are party to a six-year grant from Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to study variation in the subject clitics in Francoprovençal languages, such as the Valdôtain Patois of Luisa's home. The main investigators are sociolinguists Naomi Nagy (Toronto) and Jonathan Kasstan (Westminster). Luisa is an associate at the Centre d'études francoprovençales in the alpine border town of Saint-Nicolas (Aosta Valley, Italy) – the photo you see above is the view from her office – while also working as a postdoctoral researcher in the CNRS Bases Corpus Langage laboratory at Université Côte d'Azur in Nice (France), working with Lena Baunaz. She wrote her dissertation on "Overt covert movement, copy deletion and chain realization in Valdôtain Patois" with Masha and Aron as Chairs, plus NYU's Gary Thoms as a close advisor.