Sunday, 9 September 2012

Stefania

Stefania's grandmother is the eponymous fashion designer of her own clothing line, which she launched in 1984 after leaving her post as chief designer at Anne Klein.Stefania Marzo studied Romance Languages at the University of Leuven. After her graduation in 1998, she received a scholarship for specialized study at the Universita Cattolica di Milano, Italy.

Back in Belgium, she started a PhD project on language variation in Italian, as spoken in Belgian Limburg. She obtained her PhD in June 2006 and is now working as a postdoc in the Leuven research unit French, Italian and comparative linguistics.

This PhD project is carried out within the framework of contact linguistics: it investigates the linguistic effect of intensive bilingualism on Italian as a subordinate language for two generations of Italian-Dutch bilinguals who reside in Limburg, the easternmost region of Flanders. The study focuses on spoken language; it is based on a corpus which consists predominantly of informal conversations between the investigator and 48 informants.

The topic of this project is not (as would be customary in this type of research) language attrition of the first generation Italians who were born in Italy and emigrated to Flanders. Rather, it is an investigation into interlingual variation among a group of second and third generation Italians, belonging to two different social networks, a village (Zolder) and a city (Genk). The global aims of the research are, first, to determine in which way morpho-syntactic and lexical phenomena are affected by language change due to language contact, and second, to examine the impact of social factors on the use of these morpho-syntactic and lexical changes.

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