Giuseppe Longobardi - Biography#

Giuseppe Longobardi graduated in Classics and Linguistics from the Università di Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore. He was Professor at Venezia ‘Ca’ Foscari’ and Trieste, and now holds an Anniversary Chair in Language and Linguistic Science at York, where he is the Coordinator of the International Research Centre for Linguistic History and Diversity, established in cooperation with the Universities of Campinas, Pennsylvania and Reggio Emilia. He is also on the faculty staff of the joint linguistics PhD program of the Università ‘La Sapienza’-Terza Università in Rome. He was NATO-CNR Visiting Scholar at MIT, Fulbright Fellow at UCLA, Directeur de Recherche Etranger Associé at CNRS (Paris), and Visiting Professor at Vienna, University of Southern California, Harvard and UCLA.

He was PI of the ERC Advanced Grant ‘Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge’ (2012-2018), aiming at the first mapping of genes and languages at a cross-continental scale.

In 2022 he was elected member of the Academia Europaea.

He contributed to the study of syntactic long-distance dependencies, the philosophical concept of reference of proper names/kind names, and its syntactic expression, the format and limits of grammatical variability (Parametric Minimalism). In the past two decades he developed an original syntactic method (Parametric Comparison Method) for phylogenetic reconstruction of language families and also applied it to the issues of palaeo-anthropology arising from the comparison of linguistic and genetic diversity of human populations.

He has published on syntactic theory and historical syntax in several journals (Linguistic Inquiry, Lingua, Brain and Language, Zeitschrift f. Sprachwissenschaft, Natural Language Semantics, Linguistic Variation Yearbook, Linguistic Typology, Studi e Saggi Linguistici, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Journal of Anthropological Sciences, Linguistic Analysis, Genes, Frontiers in Psychology, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society-Biology), and has authored and edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press and edited a special issue of Journal of Historical Syntax.