Leonardo Russo Cardona

My main research interests lie in Formal Syntax and Comparative Romance Linguistics. For my doctoral project, I am studying Italian and Romance impersonal/middle constructions (i.e. involving the clitic ‘se/si’) in infinitival clauses involving tough movement. The primary purpose is improving the theoretical understanding of these problematic components of Romance grammar and providing a fine-grained parametrisation of their syntactic aspects.

Before starting my PhD, I completed a MA in Linguistics and Cognitive Studies at the University of Siena (2020-2022), during which I spent one year in Cambridge as an exchange student. My final dissertation studied Italian middle constructions in a minimalist perspective.

My passion for Linguistics first emerged during my undergraduate education: although I was studying Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Pisa and at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (2017-2020), I received some training in Linguistics and graduated with a thesis on different measures of linguistic distance.

I am supervised by Prof. Ian Roberts and Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou, and my PhD research is jointly funded by an OOC AHRC DTP studentship and the Cambridge Trust.