Andrea Carlo Moro

Andrea Moro is Professor of general linguistics at the IUSS University School of Advanced Studies in Pavia and at the Scuola Normale di Pisa. He was a full professor at the “Vita-Salute San Raffaele” University in Milan, which he contributed to found, and an associate professor at the University of Bologna. A Ph.D. in Padua, a Fulbright scholarship holder, he also obtained a diplôme d'études supérieures at the University of Geneva. He was a “visiting scientist” at MIT and Harvard several times. He has made contributions to syntactic theory and neurolinguistics. In the first field, he studied the symmetry properties of natural languages ​​starting from a unified theory for sentences with the verb “to be” and its analogues across languages. In the second, using artificial grammars, he discovered the neurobiological correlates of impossible languages, providing data in favor of the hypothesis that the rules of syntax are not arbitrary or cultural conventions and discovered that the acoustic information is always present in interior speech. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Arts and Letters at the Pantheon and of the Academia Europæa. He has published articles in major international scientific journals such as Nature, PNAS, Nature Neuroscience and Linguistic Inquiry; scientific essays such as The Raising of Predicates (Cambridge University Press 1997) and Dynamic Antisymmetry (MIT Press 2000) and popular books translated into many languages, including: I confini di Babele (Il Mulino, 2015²; Eng. trans. The Boundaries of Babel, MIT Press 2015²); Breve storia del verbo essere (Adelphi 2010); Eng. trans. A Brief History of the Verb to be (MIT Press, 2017), Parlo dunque sono (Adelphi 2024²); Eng. trans. I speak therefore I am (Columbia University Press, 2016); Impossible Languages ​​(MIT Press, 2016); It. trans. Le lingue impossibili (Cortina, 2017). The Secret of Pietramala (La Nave di Teseo, 2018) is his first literary work which was awarded the Flaiano Prize for Literature, followed by Cinquantun giorni (La Nave di Teseo, 2024).