SARACCO CATERINA

Caterina Saracco holds a PhD in Linguistic Sciences. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Bergamo with a dissertation devoted to the formal and cognitive analysis of possessive compounds in the ancient Germanic languages, with particular attention to processes of metaphor, metonymy and grammaticalization. She previously graduated in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation from the University of Milan and in Modern Languages and Cultures for International Communication from the University of Genoa, where she developed her research interests in general and historical linguistics, Germanic and Slavic philology, the history of the German language, and the study of ancient Germanic languages. Her research lies at the intersection of Germanic linguistics, general linguistics, historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and contact linguistics. She has worked on ancient Germanic languages, onomastics, historical semantics, figurative language and word-formation processes, with special attention to bahuvrīhi compounds in the ancient Germanic languages. In recent years, her research has also focused on the Germanic linguistic minorities of the Western Alps, especially the Walser communities of Piedmont and the Aosta Valley, Germanic-Romance language contact, the documentation and safeguarding of minority languages, the lexicography of the Titsch variety of Gressoney, and the analysis of variation and language change in multilingual contexts. She has carried out research at the University of Genoa, the University of Turin and the University of Milan. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships within projects devoted to the documentation of Alpine linguistic minorities and to contact between Germanic and Romance varieties, including the PRIN projects CLiMAlp and AlpiLinK. She is currently involved in the PRIN 2022 project HCAI4Gend, which focuses on human-centered artificial intelligence and gender-sensitive linguistic simplification in institutional communication in German, English and Italian. Within this project, she works on corpus construction and analysis, inclusive university communication, and the comparison of Italian, German and English linguistic practices. Alongside her research, she has extensive experience in university teaching. She has taught German language, German linguistics, translation, phonetics and phonology, specialized languages, general linguistics, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, text linguistics and academic writing at several Italian universities, including the Universities of Milan, Turin, Milan-Bicocca, Genoa, Pavia, Bologna, Insubria, Eastern Piedmont and the Polytechnic University of Milan. She has also taught in undergraduate and graduate degree programmes, in initial teacher training courses, and in courses delivered in English. She has spent periods of study and research abroad at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, where she respectively worked on data and bibliographical collection for her doctoral research and further developed a cognitive approach to linguistic analysis. She also carried out Erasmus+ teaching activities at the University of Wrocław, where she gave lectures on Romance-Germanic multilingualism in the Walser communities of Piedmont and the Aosta Valley. She is the author of a monograph on bahuvrīhi compounds in the ancient Germanic languages and of numerous articles and book chapters on Germanic linguistics, cognitive linguistics, onomastics, historical semantics, Walser minority languages, Alpine multilingualism and inclusive language. She has participated in national and international conferences in Italy and abroad, presenting research on language contact, Walser lexicography, modality and modal verbs in the Titsch variety of Gressoney, gender-sensitive language in university communication, and the relationship between corpora,