Agenda

"Grammar and conceptualization in nominals" Paolo Acquaviva (University College Dublin)

Grammatical notions like gender, number, countability, definiteness, or classifiers, are language-internal; however, they contribute to shape the way we conceptualize entities in terms of categorization and individuation. This module will clarify these conceptual characterizations and explore how the grammatical information distributed along nominal structures contributes to shaping how we represent and categorize entities.

Paolo Acquaviva is associate professor of Italian at University College Dublin. He studied at the university of Pisa and at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where he obtained his doctorate in 1993. The main themes of his research are the relation between morphology and semantics and the way language shapes the conceptualization of entities. His main publications concern grammatical number (monograph "Lexical Plurals", 2008, and "Number in the world's languages", 2022, co-edited with Michael Daniel), the theory of morphological roots, proper names, and the conceptual bases of nominality.