Irene Franco is a post-doctoral fellow at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Her expertise concerns comparative syntax and diachronic language change. She wrote a comparative PhD dissertation on the syntactic changes affecting the complementizer domain in (Old) Scandinavian and Old Italian. This work concentrates on fronting phenomena and their interaction with subjects and verb movement (Franco 2009). Among her most relevant work, she has recently developed an innovative analysis of stylistic fronting (SF) in Old Italian (Franco 2008, in prep.) on the basis of novel primary data obtained from corpus search. She has also been investigating the syntactic-pragmatic properties of the complementizer domain in a cross linguistic perspective. She has worked on complementizer insertion in long A-bar dependencies and complementizer-trace effect in Romance and Germanic (Franco 2012, Franco & Boef 2014 (2016)), as well as on complementizer omission in the diachrony of Italian (Franco 2015 a, b). Irene Franco has consolidated expertise on fieldwork and corpus methods, and a deep knowledge of Old Italian grammar. She has participated in the formulation of this project.
 |