Research

Research projects

• Principal Investigator for national inter-university project funded by the Italian Ministry of Instruction, Universities and Research: PRIN 2020 (Prot. 2020TJTA55), “Communicating transparency: New trends in English-language corporate and institutional disclosure practices in intercultural settings”. Approvato con Decreto Direttoriale 14 dicembre 2021 n. 3105.
• Associated Investigator (Head of Local Research Unit) for national inter-university project funded by the Italian Ministry of Instruction, Universities and Research: PRIN 2015 (Prot. 2015TJ8ZAS), “Knowledge Dissemination across media in English: continuity and change in discourse strategies, ideologies, and epistemologies” (Principal Investigator: Marina Bondi, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia). Approvato con Decreto Direttoriale 7 novembre 2016 n. 2634.
• Research project funded by the Government of Spain (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación del Gobierno de España – Plan Nacional I+D+i 2010-2014): Análisis multimodal del discurso académico oral en inglés para su aplicación docente e investigadora. Participating universities: Universitat Jaume I (Castellon), Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden).
• Participant in PRIN/COFIN national inter-university projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Instruction, Universities and Research
  • “Discourse identities and sense of space: from key-words to phraseology” (2008-2010)
  • “Diachronic and diatypic variation in business and economics communication: forms and functions of evaluation” (2003-2004)
  • “Small corpora and genre analysis: metadiscourse and evaluation” (2001-2002)
  • “Small corpora and genre analysis: academic discourse in the humanities and social sciences” (1999-2000).
• Projects funded by the University of Florence:
  • “The definition of methodologies for the linguistic analysis of interactions in marketing processes” (2010-2011 – member of research unit)
  • “Structural and pragmatic aspects of financial discourse: a contrastive analysis of earnings presentations and earnings releases” (2009-2010)
  • “The construction of identity in business and academic discourse: a corpus-based analysis” (2007-2008)
  • “Linguistic and discursive aspects of corporate conference calls: an analysis of a new profession genre” (2005-2006).

Other research activities

• Director of the interuniversity research center CLAVIER (Corpus and LAnguage Variation In English Research) that comprises research units at the Universities of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Bergamo, Firenze, Milano, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Roma “La Sapienza”, Siena, Trieste, Bari, Calabria, and Pisa. The members of CLAVIER share a methodological framework combines two complementary strands of linguistic investigation – corpus analysis and discourse analysis – to research on language variation in English, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. https://clavier.fileli.unipi.it/
• From January 2014: Coordinator of Corpus Research Unit established by the University of Pisa Language Center. Aims: to promote research to study the potential of corpora in language teaching, to collect corpora for use in teaching contexts and to develop multilingual and audiovisual materials for teaching.
• From November 2013: Coordinator of the Pisa unit that is part of an inter-university research center CLAVIER (Corpus and Language Variation in English Research)
• Recipient of “Morley Scholarship for Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching” (2002) to conduct research at the English Language Institute, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.