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dr Luca Molinari

I am a syntactician working on the syntax-semantics interface in both Slavic and Romance languages. My main research interests have focused so far on various aspects related to the numeral ‘one’ in Slavic (mostly Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian): the syntax underlying its grammaticalization process into an indefinite determiner, the use of ‘one’ as an indefinite in present-day languages (through experimental and corpus studies), and the diachronic processes justifying the complex lexical shape of this numeral. I have also been collaborating with other researchers on other topics, such as the syntax of verbal periphrases with the functional verbs ‘take’ and ‘go’ in comparative perspective (Italian, Italo-Romance, and Bulgarian), nominal marking in Slavic (encompassing several such languages), nanosyntactic approaches to Number marking on nouns in Piacentino (a northern Italo-Romance variety), the stackability of mirative markers in Italian, and a peculiar type of indefinites with the prefix edi- in Bulgarian.

I studied foreign languages (Russian, Swedish, and English) during my BA at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where I also obtained my MA in theoretical linguistics in 2020 with a thesis on variation and optionality in the expression of indefiniteness in Piacentino. During my MA I also started studying Bulgarian. I got my PhD from the University of Warsaw (where I started studying Polish) in co-tutelle with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, successfully defending in 2025 my PhD thesis “‘One’ numeral, many functions. Grammaticalization and use of the numeral and indefinite ‘one’ in Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian”.

I currently hold a post-doc position in the project “Collectives and singulatives across languages” (P.I. Marcin Wągiel). Thanks to this project I can explore in a nanosyntactic perspective different structural correlates of singulative and collective strategies in a large pool of languages, also considering the mereotopological properties of the lexical bases they target.