An Investigation of Hate Speech in Italian

Silvio Cruschina is Professor of Italian in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. He specialises in Romance linguistics, in particular Italian, Sicilian, and other dialects of Italy. His area of expertise is syntax, but his research interests range over a variety of subjects and topics, including information structure, pragmatics, and diachronic variation. Together with Chiara Gianollo, he coordinated the project ‘ALIHAS—A Linguistic Investigation of Hate Speech’, funded by the university alliance UNA Europa (2020‒2022), from which this volume originates. He is the author of Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections (2012) and, together with Delia Bentley and Francesco Maria Ciconte, of Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy (2015). He has also co-edited several volumes and journal special issues, and has published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Glossa, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Isogloss, Word Structure, and Probus.

Chiara Gianollo is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bologna. She is a historical linguist, with expertise in the diachrony of Greek, Latin, and Old Romance, and has a special interest in formal approaches to historical syntax and semantics. Her research on the dimensions of linguistic variation extends to the study of multilingualism in migration settings, especially with respect to educational contexts. With Silvio Cruschina she coordinated the project ‘ALIHAS—A Linguistic Investigation of Hate Speech’, funded by the university alliance UNA Europa (2020–2022), from which this volume originates. She is the author of Indefinites between Latin and Romance (2018). She co-edited, with Agnes Jäger and Doris Penka, Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface (2015); with Ilaria Fiorentini and Nicola Grandi, La classe plurilingue (2020); with Maria Napoli and Klaus von Heusinger, Determiners and Quantifiers: Functions, Variation, and Change (2022).