Bruno Spadi is a PhD student in Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. His doctoral research, titled Clitic Distribution and Verb Movement in the Languages of Sicily (supervised by Prof Colasanti), is funded by the Postgraduate Research Studentship awarded by the School of Linguistic, Speech, and Communication Sciences.
Bruno’s research lies at the intersection of theoretical and descriptive syntax, with a particular focus on Romance, especially Italo-Romance languages. His primary interests include clitic distribution, verb movement, negative markers, and, gestures. He explores how the morphosyntactic variation exhibited by these phenomena in closely-related languages spoken in Italy (especially in Sicily) contributes to challenge linguistic theory.
Seminar and Conference talks (peer-reviewed abstracts)
2025. La cliticizzazione nelle varietà siciliane. Talk given at the XXXI Congresso internazionale di linguistica e di filologia romanza (CILFR), University of Salento, 30 June – 5 July, 2025.
2024. Verb movement in the local languages of Sicily: some new empirical evidence. Talk given at the 18th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting, University of Manchester, 25-27 June 2024.
2024. Verb movement in the local languages of Sicily. Talk given at the Linguistics Research Seminars, Trinity College Dublin, 27th February 2024.
2021. Clitic placement in southern Italo-Romance: clitic distribution within Sicily. Talk given at the Linguistics Research Seminars, Trinity College Dublin, 17th November 2021.
Publications (peer-reviewed)
Spadi, B. In progress. Clitic distribution and verb movement in the languages of Sicily. PhD Dissertation, Trinity College Dublin.