Diego Rossini
https://usi.to/bk5j
Biography
I am a PhD candidate at USI working on the NCCR Evolving Language project. I hold a combined Master's degree in Natural Language Processing from Sorbonne Nouvelle, Nanterre, and INALCO, and a Master's in Linguistics from the University of Bologna, both with the highest honours.
My research focuses on lexical innovation, and more specifically on word formation. I investigate how new words are coined and compare patterns of lexical creativity across very different cultural contexts, from Western digital societies to hunter-gatherer communities, in order to identify both shared mechanisms and culturally specific factors. The theoretical frameworks I draw on are primarily onomasiological and analogy-driven approaches to word formation.
Research
The Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language is a nationwide interdisciplinary research consortium bringing together research groups from the humanities, from language and computer science, the social sciences, and the natural sciences at an unprecedented level. Together, we aim at solving one of humanity’s great mysteries: What is language? How did our species develop the capacity for linguistic expression, for processing language in the brain, and for consistently passing down new variations to the next generation? How will our capacity for language change in the face of digital communication and neuroengineering?
Within this framework the task Lexical Innovation will investigate how new terms are formed and how they spread in different contexts, thereby comparing Western societies with hunter-gatherer societies. This task is led by Prof. Lonneke van der Plas , together with Lena Jäger and Andrea Migliano from the University of Zurich.
