BAROTTO ALESSANDRA

Alessandra Barotto is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor (RTT) in Linguistics at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences of the University of Insubria. She obtained her PhD in Linguistic Sciences from the University of Bergamo and the University of Pavia in 2017, with a dissertation on the role of exemplification in the construction of conceptual categories, based on a case study of the Japanese language. From 2017 to 2021, she was a research fellow at Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, where she continued her research on the relationship between exemplification and categorization using methodologies and data drawn from linguistic typology, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. From 2022 to 2023, she was a research fellow at the University of Insubria, where she worked on a typological linguistics project focusing on the use of possessive markers to express person on the verb. Her research interests include: 1) Cognitive linguistics and categorization processes, that is, how speakers construct and communicate categories in discourse; 2) Exemplification as a cognitive and linguistic tool that enables the understanding and processing of complex and abstract concepts starting from concrete and easily analyzable material; 3) Pragmatics and linguistic politeness strategies, especially in interlinguistic and intercultural contexts; 4) Linguistic typology as an analytical tool to study linguistic phenomena by highlighting possible universal tendencies (also adopting a functionalist perspective); 5) Japanese linguistics and Semitic languages.