Francesca Di Garbo joined the GramAdapt team as a postdoctoral research fellow in January 2020. She received a BA in Classics (2005) and an MA in Classical Philology and Historical Linguistics (2007) at the University of Palermo (Italy). In 2014, she received her PhD in Linguistics at Stockholm University (Sweden). Between February 2015 and December 2016, she was affiliated to the University of Helsinki as a Wenner-Gren foundation postdoctoral fellow, and between January 2017 and December 2019, she was back at Stockholm University under an Anna Ahlström and Ellen Terserus postdoctoral fellowship.
Francesca’s research interests include the synchronic and diachronic typology of nominal classification systems and number systems, evaluative morphology, African languages (Bantu and Cushitic in particular), linguistic complexity, and the relationship between language structure and the socio-historical and natural environment. She also has an interest in database design and quantitative and experimental methods for the study of linguistic diversity and language evolution. Her publications include papers on: the typology of grammatical gender systems, nominal number, and evaluative morphology; the encoding of evaluative morphology and temperature evaluation in the Kwa language Selee, spoken in Ghana; linguistic complexity, with focus on grammatical gender and the relationship between language structures and social structures. Within the GramAdapt project, she will focus on large scale typological data collection and analyses, investigating the emergence of transparency/compositionality under language contact situations.
Francesca is currently on maternity leave.