Cora Cavirani-Pots

I’m a formal linguist, with a specialisation in morphosyntactic variation, expressivity and grammaticalisation. Empirically, I mostly focus on varieties of Dutch and Afrikaans, including varieties of Dutch spoken in the Caribbean, even though I currently work on the morphosyntax of Italian and Papiamentu (Iberian Creole) as well. I’m fascinated by unexpected morphosyntactic phenomena, i.e. cases in which the realised morphosyntax is different than we would expect from the underlying narrow syntax. Examples from my work are: infinitival marker displacement in Dutch, past participle marker displacement in Afrikaans, unexpected concord patterns in Italian expressive binomials, and recycled morphology in expressive constructions in Dutch and Afrikaans. Furthermore, I prefer to work interdisciplinary, and approach certain morphosyntactic phenomena from as many angles as possible. Currently, I’m collaborating with experts in sociolinguistics, multilingualism and code-switching, and language policy. In my own research on expressive morphology, I use methodology developed within psychology, to investigate emotion perception in expressive complex words in different varieties of Dutch.