Anna Giacalone Ramat

Anna Giacalone Ramat, born Anna Giacalone in Forlì, Italy, 17 June 1937, is an Italian linguist known for her work on grammaticalization and language acquisition.

Biography Anna Giacalone graduated from the University of Florence in 1959, subsequently studying Indo-European linguistics, Sanskrit and Germanic linguistics at the University of Würzburg and Saarland University, before taking up a position as teaching assistant (1962–1968) and then assistant professor (1968–1975) at the University of Cagliari. During the 1970s she held professorial positions at the University of Messina and the University of Milan; she spent most of her career as full professor at the University of Pavia, first in glottology (1976–1996) and then in general linguistics (1996–2010). She retired in 2010. She has served as President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics (1983–1985), of the Società Italiana di Glottologia (1991–1992), and of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (1999–2000). In 2008 she was the recipient of a festschrift.

Research Giacalone Ramat has published widely on historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, grammaticalization, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition, with expertise on the Romance, Greek, Latin and Germanic languages. She also played an important role in bringing Italian acquisitional research into contact with European research networks on L2, starting from the 1990s, in particular with the network of the European project "The structure of learner varieties" coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Her historical work has dealt with the diachronic development of interphrasal connectives, changes in passive and impersonal constructions in Romance languages, and new perspectives in the theory of grammaticalization.

Selected publications Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 1986. L'apprendimento spontaneo di una seconda lingua. Bologna: Il Mulino. Giacalone Ramat, Anna (ed.). 1988. L'italiano tra le altre lingue: strategie di acquisizione. Bologna: Il Mulino. Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 1995. Code-switching in the context of dialect/standard language relations. In Lesley Milroy & Pieter Muysken (eds.), One speaker, two languages: Crossdisciplinary perspectives on code-switching, 45–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 1998. Testing the boundaries of grammaticalization. In Giacalone Ramat & Hopper (eds.), 107–128. Giacalone Ramat, Anna, and Paul J. Hopper (eds.). 1998. The limits of grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Giacalone Ramat, Anna, and Paolo Ramat (eds.). The Indo-European languages. London: Routledge.