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Staff Profile

Dr Giulia Mazzola

Research Associate in Linguistics

  • Email: giulia.mazzola@ncl.ac.uk
  • Address: Percy Building 2.04 -
    School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.
    Newcastle University NE1 7RU
Background

I am a linguist, with expertise in Romance linguistics, corpus linguistics, language variation and change, historical (socio-)linguistics. My current research topics: clause-combining, morphosyntactic alternations, voice-encoding strategies, stylistic and textual variation, quantitative methods for corpus linguistics.


Since June 2024, I am a Research Associate in Linguistics at Newcastle University. Previously, I worked as postdoctoral assistant at KU Leuven, where I taught Spanish Linguistics to undergraduate student between 2023 and 2024. I completed my PhD in linguistics at KU Leuven in 2022, with a thesis entitled "Syndetic and asyndetic complementation in Spanish. A diachronic probabilistic account" supervised by Bert Cornillie and Malte Rosemeyer. Before that, I obtained an Research MA degree in Linguistics at Leiden University (2018) and a BA in Modern Languages and Literature (English and Spanish) at the University of Palermo (2014).

Research

Vision

As a language student, I was often struck by the overwhelming number of exceptions that came with rules. I soon learned that languages exhibit a gradient behaviour, and rules can just capture the endpoints of a continuum of possibilities. The core of my research on language variation and change focuses on the “unexplored middle ground” (Bod et al. 2003) between what is certainly possible and what is highly unlikely or impossible. From a probabilistic perspective, speakers have a statistical knowledge driving their choice of alternative linguistic forms in subtle ways. I investigate all aspects influencing the variation and the trajectories of language change: human processing abilities, frequency patterns, contextual features, social and discourse-pragmatic conventions.


Current research project

I am currently part of the research team of the Leverhulme Trust funded project "How autonomous is syntax? A case study of Romance causation and perception" (PI prof. Michelle Sheehan) on the syntax and semantics of causative and perception verbs, with a focus on micro variation across Romance varieties. The main aim of the project is to investigate the transparency of the syntax/semantics mapping in relation to causative (‘make’/‘let’) and perception verbs (‘see’/‘hear’/‘watch’) across Romance. Within this research team I am responsible for the data collection and analysis of Ibero-romance and Italo-romance varieties.

Publications