Pier Marco Bertinetto
Emeritus professor
Curriculum vitae
Professor emeritus of General Linguistics, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7977-0400
BIBLIOMETRIC INDEX
h-Index: 43; i10-Index: 126 (source: Scholarometer, July 2025)
EDUCATION
Pier Marco Bertinetto (born in Ferrara, 1947) graduated at the University of Torino in 1971 and completed his training with scholarships at the University of Uppsala (1975) and at the University College London (1976).
Since then, he has maintained regular contacts with several European and American centers for linguistic research, both within shared research programs and as a visiting scholar/professor.
(NB: the PhD title was only introduced in the Italian academic system subsequently to his appointment as a regular teacher).
ADMINISTRATIVE AND ACADEMIC DUTIES
Director of Laboratorio di Linguistica at Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) from 1981 till retirement.
Vice-director of Scuola Normale Superiore in 1999/2000.
Dean of Classe di Lettere e Filosofia therein in 2005/06.
Member of promotion committees for the CNR (twice) and for various Italian universities (6 selections for “senior researcher”, 4 for “associate professor”, 6 for “full professor”). Consultant expert in various selection procedures of European and USA universities.
Member of evaluating committees: Zentrum für Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin (2005), Excellenzinitiative del Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (2006), Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (2013), Phonetisches Laboratorium, Zürich (2015), Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Konstanz (2015).
Reviewer of projects and staff member on behalf of various universities and national research agencies (Australia, Italy, Switzerland, USA).
Honors, awards, memberships
Emeritus professor of Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.
President of Societas Linguistica Europaea for 2009.
Foreign member of the Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Finnish Academy of Sciences) since 2006.
Member of the Academia Europaea since 2010; vice-chair (2015-2019) and subsequently chair (2020-2021) of the Linguistic Studies section.
Corresponding member of the Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften since 2012.
Corresponding member of the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino since 2019.
Member of NeTS (Neurolinguistics & Theoretical Syntax) Advisory Committee, Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori, Pavia.
Former member of the Permanent Council of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences and of the board of the International Phonetic Association.
Former member of the Nominating Committee of Società di Linguistica Italiana (twice) and of Association for Linguistic Typology.
Former Member of International Advisory Board of Graduate School Language & Literature Munich, Ludwig Maximilian Universität.
First prize in the Bonaventura competition for literary criticism of the Academy of Sciences of Turin (1979).
ORDINARY AND INVITED TEACHING ACTIVITY
Assistant professor at the University of Torino (1973), associate professor therein since 1975/76 (History of the Italian Language). Full professor at Roma University in 1980/81 (General Linguistics) and from 1981/82 till retirement (2018) in Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore (first Italian Linguistics, then General Linguistics).
Visiting professor (for periods ranging from 1 week to 3 months) at: Agrigento-Palermo (2011), Basel (2016), Cairns (2018), Catania (2009), Curitiba (2008), Graz (2003, 2014), Helsinki (1990, 2003), Paris, Collège de France (2013), Paris VII-Diderot (1991, 1996), Lubiana (1997), Madison, WI (2001), Madrid, CSIC (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015), Odense (1991), Pavia, IUSS (2012, 2013, 2014), Salamanca (2001), Turku (1988), University of California at Los Angeles (1994), Vienna (1996, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007), Vitoria-Gasteiz (1997), Zürich (2011). Teacher in Corso di Perfezionamento (later on Summer School) of the Società Italiana di Glottologia (1982, 2005, 2012).
Visiting scholar at Haskins Laboratories of New Haven, Conn. (Fall 1984, Fulbright scholar), University of Connecticut at Storrs (Fall/Winter 1993/94, Fulbright scholar), Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leipzig (Spring 2002, Spring 2010).
Director of PhD thesis at Scuola Normale Superiore (see below) and external supervisor in Ph.D. theses in Italy (Napoli, Lecce, Milano “Cattolica”, Pavia, Roma 1 and 3, Venezia, Padova) and abroad (Amsterdam 1995 and 1997, Antwerpen 2014, Genève 1991, Grenoble 2000, Helsinki 2010, Leiden 2006, Nijmegen 2013).
Member of “habilitation” committee (Lyon 2013).
Lectures and plenary talks at several international institutions and conferences, among which (the list is incomplete): Amsterdam (1981), Austin (2008), Barcelona (1988, 1997), Belo Horizonte (4th GSCP Conference, 2012), Berlin, Freie Universität (2005), Birmingham (2009), Brandeis University (1994), Ciudad Real (2006), Columbia University (1983), Copenhagen (1990), Delaware University (1994), Florianopolis (1987), Forlì (2008), Freiburg im Bresgau (1997), Guilford, Surrey (2009), Geneva (1984, 1990, 2006), Göteborg (21012), Graz (1996), Grenoble (2012), Groningen (1981), Helsinki (1988), Kiel (1992), Klagenfurt (1993), Konstanz (1997), København (1988), Krems (1988; 1992), Lausanne (2006), Leiden (1981), Leipzig (2010), Madrid, U. Autónoma (2015), Nantes (1999), Napoli (2009), New York University (1983), Nijmegen (1981), Odense (1988), Regensburg (2010), Roma I (2008), Roma III (2012), Salzburg (1996), Smith College, Northampton, Mass. (1983), Sofia (1999, 2000, 2011), Stockholm (1989), Skopje (2011), Stony Brook (NY) (1994), Tallinn (1987), Trento (1995), Trieste (2007), Tübingen (2020, 2022), Turku (1990), Utrecht (1981), Verona (2009), Vienna (1985, 1988, 1996), Yale University (1983), Zürich (1986, 2000, 2006).
RESEARCH ACTIVITY
(See also full list of pubblications at: http://linguistica.sns.it/PaginePersonali/Bertinetto.htm)
2011-2013: Co-coordinatore, assieme a Bernard Laks (Paris X), del Progetto Internazionale di Cooperazione Scientifica (PICS): “Modèles cognitifs et computationnels du phénomène syllabe”.
2011-2013: Co-coordinator, together with Silvia Calamai (Università di Siena) of the PAR-FAS project Grammo.Foni. Le soffitte della voce, funded by the Tuscany Region on the base of European subsidies. Cf. http://grafo.sns.it/.
2009-2013: Coordinator of the FIRB project “Wikimemo.it: Il portale della lingua e della cultura italiana”.
2007 e 2008: Co-coordinator, together with Bernard Laks (Paris X) of two “Galileo” projects subsidized by the French-Italian university on the computational modeling of syllable and phonotactic structures.
2005-2007: Coordinator of the national project “Language acquisition and (diachronic / diatopic) variation. Principles and strategies of systemic organization”.
2002-2004: Local coordinator within the national project “Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto” CLIPS), funded by MIUR. Cf. http://www.clips.unina.it/it/.
2001-2003: Local coordinator within the national project “Italiano Parlato” (IPar), with the subproject “Indagini segmentali, prosodiche e pragmatiche sul parlato toscano IParT)”. Cf.
2000-2002: Coordinator of the project “Corpus e Lessico di Frequenza dell’Italiano Scritto” (CoLFIS), supported by Centro Nazionale della Ricerca and carried out in collaboration with (what were at the time called) Istituto di Psicologia di Roma of CNR and Istituto per i Circuiti Elettronici di Genova of CNR. Cf.:
http://linguistica.sns.it/CoLFIS/Home.htm/ e http://linguistica.sns.it/esploracolfis/home.htm/.
1999-2001: Local coordinator within the national project: “Archivio di Parlato Italiano” (API), subproject: “Analisi segmentale e prosodica di un corpus di italiano parlato”. Cf. http://www.parlaritaliano.it/index.php/it/corpora/673-corpus-avip-api/.
1997-1999: Coordinator of the national project “Archivio Vocale di Varietà di Italiano Parlato” (AVIP).
1995-1996: Local coordinator within the national project: “Aspetti della coarticolazione nel linguaggio parlato”.
1990-1995: Member of the group Tense and aspect of the EUROTYP program, funded by the ESF (1989-94).
1982-1985: Local coordinator within an ESPRIT project, funded by the European Commission, concerning the study of Italian prosody.
1978: Team member of the interdisciplinary research project on speech synthesis carried out at CSELT, Torino (the prototype model MUSA was awarded the third prize in the 1979 Telettra international competition).
EDITORIAL ACTIVITY
Editor-in-chief of Italian Journal of Linguistics since its foundation in 1989.
Member of the editorial board of Journal of Speech Sciences since 2010.
Member (since 2010) of the Editorial Board of the series Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory, Brill (Amsterdam), and of the series In forma di parola, Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria (since 2011).
Editor of the series Memorie del Laboratorio di Linguistica della SNS, L'Orso Edizioni, Alessandria.
Former editor of the series Linguistica, Rosenberg & Sellier, Torino.
Former member of the editorial board of Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Classe di Lettere e Filosofia), Language Studies, Rivista Italiana di Acustica, Romance Philology.
CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION
Italo-Americana 7 (Cortona 2017)
13th Annual Conference of Associazione Italiana Scienze della Voce (2017)
Presente e futuro di un corpus dell’italiano: CoLFIS e oltre (2015)
Chronos 11 (International Conference on actionality, aspect, tense and modality/evidentiality (2014)
2nd International Workshop on Phonotactics and Phonotactic Modeling (2013)
Italo-Americana IV (COrtona 2013)
Phonotactic grammar: Theories and models (Cortona 2012)
Gli archivi sonori: per un dialogo interdisciplinare (Pisa, 2011)
Towards a synergistic European initiative for speech-recordings long-term preservation (Pisa, 2011)
Verb Features (Pisa, 2010)
Sociophonetics, at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication (Pisa, 2010).
Italo-Americana. Linguisti italiani e lingue del Sud America (Pisa, 2009)
Linguaggio e cervello – Semantica: 42° Congresso internaz. della Società di Linguistica Italiana (Pisa 2008)
From Phonetics-Phonology to Linguistic Modeling (Pisa, 2008)
Phonology Workshop (Pisa 2007)
The Architecture of Language (Pisa, 2006)
Categorie del verbo. 31° Convegno Annuale della Società Italiana di Glottologia (Pisa 2006)
Language development in time and space (Pisa, 2005)
Workshop on Lexical Semantic Systems (Pisa 1998)
23° Incontro di Grammatica Generativa (Pisa 1997)
Ottave Giornate del Gruppo di Fonetica Sperimentale (Pisa 1997)
Tense-Aspect Meeting (Cortona 1993)
Certamen Phonologicum (Cortona 1987, 1990, 1996)
6° Incontro Informale di Grammatica Generativa (Torino 1981)
SUPERVISED Ph.D. THESES
1. Giovanna MAROTTA (full professor, U. of Pisa): Aspetti della struttura temporale in italiano, 1984 (external supervisors: Bjørn Lindblom, Stockholm; Alberto Mioni, Padova; Edoardo Vineis, Bologna).
2. Alessandra GIORGI (full professor, U. of Venezia): On the Italian anaphoric system, 1985 (external supervisors: Guglielmo Cinque, Venezia; Domenico Parisi, Roma).
3. Cinzia AVESANI (researcher at Istituto di Fonetica del CNR, Padova): A Study of the Declination Line in Italian Intonation, 1989 (external supervisors: Michael Studdert-Kennedy, CUNY; Robert Ladd, Edinburgh).
4. Denis DELFITTO (full professor, U. of Verona): Generics and Variables in Syntax, 1990 (external supervisors: James Higginbotham, MIT; Guglielmo Cinque, Venezia).
5. Paolo ACQUAVIVA (associate professor, U. College Dublin): The syntax of Negation. A Generative Approach, 1993 (external supervisors: James McCloskey, Santa Cruz; Giuseppe Longobardi, Venezia).
6. Michele LOPORCARO (full professor, U. of Zürich): Accordo del participio passato nelle lingue neolatine, 1993 (external supervisors: Edward Tuttle, UCLA; Nunzio La Fauci, Palermo).
7. Mario SQUARTINI (full professor, U. of Torino): On the Grammaticalization Path of Some Romance Verbal Periphrases, 1995 (external supervisors: Ignacio Bosque, Complutense, Madrid; Bernard Comrie, USC; Östen Dahl, Stockholm).
8. Valentina BIANCHI (associate professor, U. of Siena): Consequences of Antisymmetry for the Syntax of Headed Relative Clauses, 1995 (external supervisors: Adriana Belletti, Perugia; Richard Kayne, CUNY; Jan Koster, Groningen; Jean-Yves Pollock, Amiens).
9. Georgi JETCHEV (associate professor, U. of Sofia): Ghost vowels and syllabification. Evidence from Bulgarian and French, 1997 (external supervisors: Pierre Encrevé, EHESS, Paris; Jerzy Rubach, Warszawa & U. Iowa; Ernest Scatton, Albany, SUNY).
10. Luca DINI (director of CELI, a computational linguistics firm in Torino): Events and their Measures, 1998 (external supervisors: Gennaro Chierchia, Milano; Ewan Klein, Edinburgh; Hans Uszkoreit, Saarbrüccken).
11. Alessandro LENCI (full professor, U. of Pisa): On Predication. Categorical and Thetic Structures in Language, 1999 (external supervisors: James Higginbotham, Oxford; Gabriel Sandu, Helsinki).
12. Domokos VÉKÁS (diplomate; former associate professor, U. of Budapest): Indizi fonetici di strutture prosodiche. Domini prosodici e rapporti di coarticolazione intersegmentale, 2000 (external supervisors: Olle Engstrand, Stockholm; Georges Boulakia, Paris VII).
13. Alexander MURZAKU (associate professor, College of St.Elisabeth, Morristown NJ): Albanian deictics. A Review of the Meaning and Functionality of Demonstratives and Deictic Adverbs (external supervisors: Paolo Di Giovine, Roma ‘La Sapienza’; Victor Friedman, Chicago)
14. María Enriqueta Péréz Vázquez (aggregate professor, U. of Parma), El infinitivo y su sujeto explícito en español e italiano, 2002 (external supervisors: Adriana Belletti, Siena; Elena De Miguel, Complutense, Madrid; Gunver Skytte, København).
15. Marco MAIOCCO: The Syntax of Indoeuropean. Absolute Participial Constructions, 2002 (external supervisors: Marina Benedetti, Giuseppe Longobardi, Trieste; Frans Plank, Konstanz; Paolo Ramat, Pavia).
16. Chiara FINOCCHIARO (aggregate professor, U. of Trento): L’elaborazione dei clitici pronominali in italiano. Un tentativo di analisi sperimentale, 2002 (external supervisors: Alfonso Caramazza, Harvard; Patrizia Tabossi, Trieste)
17. Barbara GILI FIVELA (associate professor, U. of Lecce): The Phonetics and Phonology of Intonation: The Case of Pisa Italian, 2004 (external supervisors: Gösta Bruce, Lund; Martine Grice, Köln; Giovanna Marotta, Pisa)
18. Chiara CELATA (aggregate professor, U. of Urbino): Analisi dei processi di retroflessione delle liquide in area romanza, con dati sperimentali dal córso e dal siciliano, 2006 (external supervisors: Stefania Giannini, U. per Stranieri, Perugia; Michele Loporcaro, Zürich; Giovanna Marotta, Pisa)
19. Valentina Cambi: Tempo e aspetto in ittito, con particolare riferimento al suffisso -ske/a-, 2006 (external supervisors: Giuseppe Delmonte, Pisa; Norbert Oettinger, Erlangen; Calvert Watkins, UCLA, Los Angeles)
20. Valentina BAMBINI (associate professor, IUSS, Pavia): A metaphorical window into the language-brain.context relations, 2007 (external supervisors: Bruno G. Bara, Torino; Alfonso Caramazza, Harvard & Trento; Francesco Di Russo, IUSM Roma; Pietro Pietrini, Pisa)
21. Basilio CALDERONE (researcher, CNRS, Toulouse): Unsupervised Learning of Linguistic Structures, 2008 (relatori esterni: Timo Honkela, Helsinki; Bernard Laks, Paris X; Alessandro Lenci, Pisa)
22. Margherita FARINA (researcher, CNRS, Paris): An Outline of Middle Voice in Syriac. Evidences of a Linguistic Category, 2009 (external supervisors: Piergiorgio Borbone, Pisa; Riccardo Contini, Napoli ‘L’Orientale’; Holger Gzella, Leiden; W.T. Van Peursen, Leiden)
23. Sara Eco CONTI: I tempi nel sistema verbale greco antico e il caso dell'imperativo, 2010 (external supervisors: Piero Berrettoni, Pisa; Jesús de la Villa Polo, Universidad Autónoma Madrid; Jean Lallot, Paris ENS)
24. Michelangelo FALCO: Deterministic mapping and dependencies. A syntax/semantic interface account of crossover and specificity, 2010 (external supervisors: Denis Delfitto, Verona; Luigi Rizzi, Siena; Dominique Sportiche, Paris ENS e Los Angeles UCLA)
25. Emanuela SANFELICI (aggregate professor, U. of Padova): La sintassi delle subordinate non finite in antico e medio irlandese. Il tipo DP doNV, 2011 (external supervisors: Giuseppe Longobardi, Trieste; Elisa Roma, Pavia; Karin Stüber, Zürich)
26. Talatou Clémentine PACMOGDA: Acquisition du système temporel moore, 2012 (external supervisors: Sophie Kern, Lyon; Alessandro Lenci, Pisa; Norbert Nikiéma, Ouagadougou)
27. ZHI Na (researcher, Beijing): A Study on Form and Function of Prosody based on Acoustics, Interpretation, and Modelling: With Evidence from the Analysis by Synthesis of Mandarin Speech Prosody, 2012. (external supervisors: Daniel Hirst, Aix-en-Provence; Giovanna Marotta, Pisa)
28. Luca PESINI (researcher, Zürich): Tra coordinazione e subordinazione: La paraipotassi in italiano antico, 2013 (external supervisors: Alberto Nocentini, Firenze; Wolfgang Schweickart, Saarland).
29. Luca CIUCCI (researcher, Cairn): Inflectional morphology in the Zamucoan languages, 2013 (external supervisors: Antoine Guillaume, Lyon; Pieter Muysken, Nijmegen).
30. Marta Ghio (researcher, U. of Trento): A cognitive and pragmatic approach to meaning. Behavioral and neural correlates of concept processing, 2013. (external supervisors: Valentina Bambini, IUSS Pavia; Lewis Bott, Cardiff; Marco Tettamanti, Milano S. Raffaele)
31. Giovanna LENOCI: Balbuzie evolutiva e indici fonetici predittivi di cronicità, 2015 (external supervisors: Stephan Schmid, Zürich U.; Claudio Zmarich, CNR, Padova)
32. Biancamaria CEPOLLARO: The semantics and pragmatics of slurs and thick terms, 2017 (in co-tutela con Institut ‘Jean Nicod’, Paris) (co-supervisor: Isidora Stojanovič, ‘Jean Nicod’, Paris; external supervisors: Claudia Bianchi, ‘S.Raffaele’, Milano; Robin Jeshion, USC, Los Angeles; Marina Sbisà, Trieste; Pekka Väyrynen, Leeds)
33. Rosalba NODARI: L'italiano degli adolescenti: aspirazione delle occlusive sorde in Calabria e percezione della varietà locale, 2017 (external supervisors: Giovanna Marotta, Pisa; Stephan Schmid, Zürich)
34. Chikelu EZENWAFOR (researcher, Nigeria): A Grammatical Sketch of Etulo, 2017 (external supervisors: Felix Ameka, Leiden; Melanie Green, U. of Sussex)
35 Irene LORENZINI (researcher, Paris): Hard to say, hard to see? Speech-in-noise discrimination at different levels of sensorimotor proficiency (2018, external supervisors: Marinella Majorano, Verona; Thierry Nazzi, U. Paris Descartes)
36 Simona DI PAOLA: Individual Variation in Metaphor Comprehension and Processing (2019, external supervisors: Valentina Bambini, IUSS, Pavia; Nausicaa Pouscoulous, UC London)
37 CHEN Cheng (aggregate professor, Shanhai): Inter-gestural Coordination in Temporal and Spatial domains in Italian: Synchronous EPG + UTI Data (2019, external supervisors: Martine Grice, Köln Universität; Mark Gibson, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona; Chiara Celata, SNS)
38 Marco SENALDI (researcher, Montréal): Working both sides of the street: Computational and psycholinguistic investigations on idioms variability (2019, co-supervisor: Alessandro Lenci, Pisa; external supervisors: Cristina Cacciari, Reggio e Modena; Sabine Schulte im Walde, Stuttgart; Debra Titone, Montréal, McGill)
39 Valentina BENEDETTINI: Multimodal Event Knowledge. Psycholinguistic and Computational Experiments
(2021, co-supervisor: Alessandro Lenci; external supervisors: Basilio Calderone, CNRS Toulouse; Ken McRae, U. of Western Ontario)
40 Giulia CAPPELLI: Implicit indefinite objects at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface: a probabilistic model of acceptability judgments (2022, co-supervisor: Alessandro Lenci; external supervisors: Anna Cardinaletti, Venezia; Paul Smolensky, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore)