VIVIANA MASIA
(aggiornato ad aprile 2019)
Place and date of birth: Rome, 01/11/1986
Contact: viviana.masia@gmail.com
Position:
- 1 December 2018 – present: Post-doc researcher at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the University of Roma Tre (project: Pragmatica della persuasione implicita “Pragmatics of Implicit Persuasion”, Supervisor: Prof. Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri).
- October 2017 – present: Professor of General Linguistics at the Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici in Pisa.
- November 2018 – present: Teaching assistant of General Linguistics at the University of Roma Tre.
- 1 September 2018 – 14th February 2019: Research collaborator for the project LiveTextAccess (LTA) co-funded by the ERASMUS + Programme of the EU with the reference 2018-1-DE01-KA203-004218 (website: https://ltaproject.eu/).
Previous:
- 1 June, 2017 – 31 May 2018: Post-doc researcher at the University of Roma Tre, Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures (Scientific director: Prof. Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, University of Roma Tre).
- June 2016 – May 2017 (1 year): Post-doc researcher at the University of Genoa, Department of Educational Sciences (Psychology Unit) for an experimental project on presupposition processing (Scientific director: Dott. Filippo Domaneschi, University of Genoa).
- January 2013 – December 2015 (3 years): Ph.D in General Linguistics at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts, Roma Tre University (Italy). Thesis title: Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure (Supervisor: Prof. Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri), defended in April 2016.
Education:
- M.A. – 2012: Department of Linguistics. Thesis title: Per un sistema di misurazione degli impliciti nei testi persuasivi, (translated) For a measurement system of implicit information in persuasive texts (Supervisor: Prof. Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri), Roma Tre University. 110/110 cum laude.
- B.A.– 2009: Department of Linguistics. Thesis title: Fenomeni di interferenza sintattica del gaelico d’Irlanda sull’Irish English, (translated) Syntactic Interferences of Irish Gaelic on Irish English (Supervisor: Prof. Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri), Roma Tre University. 110/110 cum laude.
- High school – 2005: Accountant school “Vittorio Bachelet” (Rome). Score: 100/100.
Scholarships:
2013-2015: Three-year Ph.D grant won at the University of Roma Tre (Rome, Italy).
International Experience:
- Three-month research period at the Laboratory of Experimental Linguistics (XLinc) of the University of Cologne (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Petra B. Schumacher).
Teaching Experience (Seminars):
- March 2015: lecture on Neurolinguistics. Birth of the discipline, present-day brain imaging techniques and workings of the human memory system, held at the Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici (Pisa, Italy).
- March 2015: lecture on Neurolinguistics. Birth of the discipline, present-day brain imaging techniques and experimental studies, held at the Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici (Pisa, Italy).
- May 2015: lecture on Tracing the Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure held at the University of Cologne.
- March 2016: lecture on Reading in a Foreign Language, held at Advanced School for Linguistic Mediators (Pisa, Italy).
- June 2016: lecture on Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure, held at the University of Florence (Italy) for the LABLITA Laboratory, directed by Prof. Emanuela Cresti and Prof. Massimo Moneglia.
- November 2016: lecture on Neurobiological Bases of Information Structure, held at the S.Lucia Foundation (Center for Neurosciences and Rehabilitation).
- December 2016: lecture on Neurobiological Bases of Information Structure, for the Romanisches Seminar Department at the University of Zurich (Prof. Michele Loporcaro)
- October 2017: Lecture on Neurological Bases of Language (Basi neurobiologiche del linguaggio). Seminar held at the Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici (SSML, Pisa, Italy).
- April 2018 – Lecture on Neurobiological Bases of Information Structure: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives, held at the University of Stockholm (organized by Dott. Roberta Colonna-Dahlman).
- April 2019 – Neurophysiology and Information Structure between Theory and Experimentation. Lecture held at the University Ca’ Foscari (Venice) (organized by Prof. Roland Hinterhölzl), 16th April 2019.
Other scientific activities:
- 2009: participation in training courses for CELI examinators organized by the Center for Linguistic Evaluations and Certifications (CVCL).
- January 2012: attendance at the Winter School TRIPLE 2012, Roma Tre University (Rome).
- September 2013: attendance at the Summer School of Linguistics, University of Udine (Italy).
- February 2014: attendance at the Winter School of TRIPLE 2014, Roma Tre University (Rome).
- Organization of the XI° AISC-CODISCO Congress, 2014 Bodies, Tools and Cognition, December 2-5, 2014, Roma Tre University.
- Organization of the Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Presuppositions held at the University of Genoa, 3-5 March, 2017.
- Organization of the 1° Workshop XPRAG.it – Behavioral and Neural Evidence on Pragmatic Processing, held at the University of Genoa, 10-11, June, 2017.
- (con Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Laura Baranzini, Federica Cominetti, Doriana Cimmino, Giorgia Mannaioli & Claudia Coppola). Organization of the panel "Qualitative and quantitative approaches to implicit communication" al Convegno ARGAGE – Argumentation & Language, Università di Lugano, dal 07-02-2018 al 09-02-2018.
- (con Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Laura Baranzini, Federica Cominetti, Doriana Cimmino, Giorgia Mannaioli & Claudia Coppola). Organization of the workshop Implicitness and Persuasion in Language to be held at the 53° SLI Conference in Como, 19-21 September, 2019.
Affiliations:
Member of the Italian Society of Linguistics and Philology (SILFI), Member of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), Società di Linguistica Italiana (SLI).
Reviewing activity:
- Occasional reviewer for the journal Sistemi Intelligenti, Il Mulino, Bologna.
- Member of the Editorial Board of Philosophy Study, David Publishing Company.
- Member of the Programme Committee and reviewer of abstract proposals for the 2017 AISCMid-Term held in Messina.
- Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Experimental and Clinical Research.
- Occasional reviewer for Co.Me – Studies on Communication and linguistic and cultural Mediation
- Occasional reviewer for Language Sciences (ISSN 0388-0001)
- Member of the editorial board of Trends in Anatomy and Physiology (http://www.heraldopenaccess.us/journals/Trends-In-Anatomy-And-Physiology/editorial-board.php)
- Member of the editorial board of the Journal of Asian Research (ISSN: 2575-1565)
- Member of the Editorial Board of Communication and Linguistics Studies (2469-7850)
Supervision and mentoring activity at the Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici (Pisa):
Assistant supervisor for bachelor degrees at the Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici (Pisa, Italy):
- Mei, Eleonora. Élements de neurolinguistique chez les interprètes de conférence. BA degree, July 2017.
- Donati, Francesca. Translation of the Ph.D thesis entitled The Effect of Age on Second Language Acquisition in Older Adults. BA degree, October 2017.
- Nadifi, Dunia. The study of languages: brain and linguistic processes (neurolinguistics of the acquisition of foreign languages). BA degree, October 2017.
- Narcisi Giulia, Journey through the vineyards, BA degree, July 2018.
- Potenza Emanuela, Mehr Sprachen-mehr Chancen Über Zwei-und Mehrsprachigkeit von Kindern (translation of the book by Regine Fehlings de Acurio), BA degree, July 2018.
- Giuntini Marina, La manipulation pendant le fascisme, BA degree, October 2018.
- Valli Elisa, Le sexisme dans la langue en France et en Italie, BA degree, October 2018.
- Bruno Matteo, translation of Why do perfectly normal people become raving lunatics online? By Jamie Madigan, BA degree, October 2018.
Conference talks:
2014
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). Specificità della lingua persuasiva: quantificare l’implicito nei testi politici e pubblicitari, XIII° SILFI Congress, La lingua variabile nei testi letterari, artistici e funzionali contemporanei (1915-2014): analisi, interpretazione, traduzione, Palermo (Sicily), September 22-24, 2014.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). L'implicite comme moyen de persuasion: une approche quantitative. Colloque International Autour des formes implicites, Limoges, 13-14 November 2014.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). Misurare l’informazione implicita nella propaganda politica italiana, XI° ASLI Congress – L’italiano per la politica e la politica per l’italiano, Naples, November 20-22, 2014.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). La struttura Topic-Focus si è evoluta per economia di processazione? (Eng. Has Topic-Focus structure evolved for economy of processing?), XI° AISC-CODISCO Congress, Rome, December 20-5, 2014.
2015
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). Did informational prominence evolve to ensure economy of processing? Poster presented at the International Conference on Prominence in Language, Köln, June 15-17, 2015.
- (with Vittorio Ganfi). Towards a pragmatic account of the particle persino/perfino in Italian: steps of a grammaticalization process, International Conference on Historical Linguistics, July 27-31, 2015, Naples.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). L’information implicite entre économie d’effort et esquive du jugement critique, ARGAGE Conference on Argumentation and Language: Linguistic markers, discursive processes, cognitive operations, Lausanne, September 9-11, 2015.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). Easing automation in sentence processing: the emergence of Topic and Presupposition units in human language, Protolang 4, Rome, September 24-26, 2015.
2016
- (with Vittorio Ganfi). Modelli cognitivi top-down nell’acquisizione linguistica: uno sguardo al ruolo delle aspettative nell’insegnamento/apprendimento dell’italiano come L2, XIV° Congresso SILFI – Acquisizione e didattica dell’italiano, Madrid, April, 4-6, 2016.
- Lecture on Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure, (doctoral dissertation) Linguaggio a Roma Tre, May 26, 2016, University of Roma Tre.
- (with Gioia Insacco). Between eventive and stative nominalizations in Italian: a constructional and cognitively-based account, 49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Naples, 31 August-3 September, 2016.
- (with Paolo Canal, Irene Ricci, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Filippo Domaneschi e Valentina Bambini) – Neurolinguistic perspectives on presupposition processing, Associazione Italiana di Scienze Cognitive – Italian Association of Cognitive Sciences (AISC), Turin, November, 24-26, 2016.
- Neurocognitive underpinning of Information Structure: between bottom-up and top-down processing, Associazione Italiana di Scienze Cognitive – Italian Association of Cognitive Science (AISC), Turin, November 24-26, 2016.
- Automaticity and control in the processing of Information Structure, Workshop on ‘Automatic and controlled processes in language’, Associazione Italiana di Scienze Cognitive – Italian Association of Cognitive Sciences (AISC), Turin, November 24-26, 2016.
- (with Davide Garassino) – Le funzioni del significato implicito su Twitter: Uno studio sulla comunicazione politica in Italia e in Inghilterra, lecture presented at the Romanisches Seminar (Director: Prof. Michele Loporcaro), University of Zürich.
- Neurobiological Bases of Information Structure, lecture presented at the Romanisches Seminar (Director: Prof. Michele Loporcaro), University of Zürich.
2017
- An integrated account of Information Structure and Evidentiality: from political speech to human communication, talk presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), University of Zurich, September 10th-13th, 2017.
- (with Davide Garassino and Nicola Brocca) – Implicit Communication in Twitter. A Comparative Corpus-Based Analysis of Presupposition and Implicatures in Italian and English Political Communication, talk presented at the 5th meeting of Linguistics Beyond and Within International Linguistics Conference, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin “The Outskirts of the Regular”, 18-19 October, 2017.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Doriana Cimmino, Laura Baranzini, Federica Cominetti, Claudia Coppola, Giorgia Mannaioli) – The Outskirts of Linguistic Persuasion: Measuring Implicit Presentation of Questionable Information, talk presented at the 5th meeting of Linguistics Beyond and Within International Linguistics Conference, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin “The Outskirts of the Regular”, 18-19 October, 2017.
- (with Margherita Diex, Emanuela Piciucco, Emanuele Maiorana, Patrizio Campisi & Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). Assessing word-class constraints on Information Structure processing. Talk presented at the 14th AISC Annual Conference, The Science of Cognition. Brain, Body, Language and Technologies, University of Bologna, 14-16 December 2017.
2018
- (with Davide Garassino and Nicola Brocca). Implicit communication in Twitter: analysing the pragmatic functions of politicians’ use of implicatures and presuppositions. Talk presented at the 2018 ARGAGE – Argumentation & Language Conference, Lugano, 7th-9th February within the panel Qualitative and quantitative approaches to implicit communication.
- Organization of the panel Qualitative and quantitative approaches to implicit communication within the 2018 ARGAGE – Argumentation & Language Conference, Lugano, 7th-9th February.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). Processamento della Struttura Informativa: ritmi oscillatori e analisi tempo-frequenza. Talk presented at the Giornata di Linguistica Sperimentale e Computazionale, organized at the University of Padua, 23 February 2018.
- (with Nicola Brocca and Ewa Kuçelman), Developing Cultural and Metalinguistic Competences by extracting implicit contents from political tweets: a comparative Italian and Polish project, Talk presented at the Round Table on “Social Net(work)s in Education and Language Sciences”, 15th June, 2018, Heidelberg School of Education.
- (with Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri). La comunicazione implicita come dimensione di variazione tra tipi testuali [Implicit communication at the boundary between textual genres]. Talk presented at the XV° SILFI Congress Linguaggi settoriali e specialistici [Eng. trans. Technical and specialized languages], 28-31 May, 2018, Genoa.
- (with Matteo Pandimiglio). Linguistica, diritto e variazione. Uno sguardo alle sentenze in Italia [“Linguistics, law and variation. A look at the language of verdicts in Italy]. Talk presented at the XV° SILFI Congress Linguaggi settoriali e specialistici [Eng. trans. Technical and specialized languages], 28-31 May, 2018, Genoa.
2019
- (Re-)assessing the status of Second Occurrence Focus in Information Structure: Evidence from phonological, processing and micropragmatic perspectives. Talk presented at the workshop “When Data Challenges Theory: Non-Prototypical, Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in the Field of Information Structure, Freiburg, 15-16 February, 2019.
- (with Nicola Brocca and Leo Will). Make pragmatics great again! Teaching implicatures and presuppositions as a part of democracy education in the age of Twitter and Facebook. Talk presented at the international conference Educating the Global Citizen. International Perspectives on Foreign Language Teaching in the Digital Age, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, 25-28 March, 2019.
Awards
- Best Talk Award acknowledged for the talk Implicit Communication in Twitter. A Comparative Corpus-Based Analysis of Presupposition and Implicatures in Italian and English Political Communication presented at the 5th meeting of Linguistics Beyond and Within International Linguistics Conference, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin “The Outskirts of the Regular”, 18-19 October, 2017, and co-authored by Davide Garassino and Nicola Brocca.
Scientific publications
Journal articles
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (2014). Implicitness impact: measuring texts, Journal of Pragmatics, 61, 161-184.
- La Rocca D., Masia V., Maiorana E., Lombardi Vallauri E. & Campisi P. (2016). Brain response to information structure misalignments in linguistic contexts. Neurocomputing, 199, 1-15.
- Masia, V. & Ganfi, V. (2016). Modelli cognitivi top-down tra teoria e sperimentazione: uno sguardo al ruolo delle aspettative nell’apprendimento/acquisizione dell’italiano come L2. CoMe – Studi di Comunicazione e Mediazione linguistica e culturale, No. 1, 1-10.
- Brocca, N., Garassino, D. & Masia, V. (2016). Politici nella rete o nella rete dei politici? L’implicito nella comunicazione politica italiana su Twitter. PhiN-Beiheft, 11/2016, 66-79.
- Masia V., Canal P., Lombardi Vallauri E., Bambini V. (2017). Presupposition of new information as a pragmatic garden path: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 42, 31-48.
- Masia V. (2017). A sociobiological account of indirect speech. Interaction Studies, 18(1), 141-159. doi 10.1075/is.18.1.07mas.
- Masia, V. (2017). On the Evidential Status of Presupposition and Assertion. International Journal of Linguistics, 9(4), 134-153. doi:10.5296/ijl.v9i4.11794.
- Domaneschi, F., Canal, P., Masia, V., Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Bambini, V. (2018). N400 and P600 modulation in presupposition accommodation: The effect of different trigger types. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 45, 13-35.
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (2018). Context and Information Structure constraints on factivity: the case of “know”. Language Sciences, 66, 103-115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2018.02.001.
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (2018). Facilitating automation in sentence processing: the Emergence of Topic and Presupposition in Human Communication. TOPOI, 37(2), 343-354.
- Masia, V. & Campo, I. (2018). Intra- and inter-semiotics in action. Analysis of two translations of a CNN report. CoMe III (1), 44-64.
Conference proceedings
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (2015). Cognitive Constraints on the Emergence of Topic-Focus Structure in Human Communication. In Ganfi V. & Chiera A. (Eds.), Immagine e pensiero. Bilanci nelle scienze cognitive attuali, Corisco, Roma-Messina, 180-204.
- Lombardi Vallauri E. & Masia, V. (2015). Context-dependent information processing: Towards an expectation-based parsing model of Information Structure. In Proceedings of the 9th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (pp. 440-453), Christiansen H., Stojanovic I. & Papadopoulos G. (eds.), LNAI 9405 Series, Springer, Switzerland.
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (2016). Misurare l’informazione implicita nella propaganda politica italiana. In Proceedings of XI° ASLI Congress – Associazione per la Storia della Lingua Italiana, L’italiano della politica e la politica per l’italiano (pp. 539-557), Franco Cesati, Firenze.
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (2016). Specificità della lingua persuasiva: l’implicito discutibile. In Proceedings of XIII° SILFI Congress, La lingua variabile nei testi letterari, artistici e funzionali contemporanei (1915-2014): analisi, interpretazione, traduzione (pp. 637-654), Franco Cesati, Firenze.
- Masia V., Canal P., Ricci I., Lombardi Vallauri E., Domaneschi F. & Bambini V. (2016). Neurolinguistic perspectives on presupposition processing. In Mind the gap: Brain, Cognition and society, Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the Italian Association for Cognitive Sciences, AISC (pp. 236-243), Turin, 24-26 November 2016.
- Masia V. (2016). Neurocognitive underpinnings of Information Structure: between bottom-up and top-down processing. In Mind the gap: Brain, Cognition and Society, Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the Italian Association for Cognitive Sciences, AISC (pp. 230-235), Turin, 24-26 November 2016.
- Masia V. & Ganfi V. (in press). Il ruolo delle aspettative nell’apprendimento linguistico: modelli teorici e dati empirici. In Borreguero Zuloaga, M. (a cura di), L'italiano, lingua d'apprendimento: riflessioni teoriche, nuovi apprendenti e storia. Frankfurt, M., Peter Lang, 2018.
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (in press). La comunicazione implicita come dimensione di variazione tra tipi testuali. Atti del XV° Congresso della Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana Linguaggi settoriali e specialistici: sincronia, diacronia, traduzione, variazione, 29-30 May 2018, Genoa.
- Pandimiglio M. & Masia, V. (in press). Linguistica, diritto e variazione: uno sguardo al linguaggio delle sentenze in Italia. Atti del XV° Congresso della Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana Linguaggi settoriali e specialistici: sincronia, diacronia, traduzione, variazione, 29-30 May 2018, Genoa.
Books
- Masia, V. (2017). Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Papers in preparation, submitted or in press:
- Lombardi Vallauri, E., Baranzini, L., Masia, V., Cimmino, D., Mannaioli, G. & Coppola, C: (in press). The outskirts of linguistic persuasion: measuring implicit presentiation of questionable information. To be published in the Proceedings of the the 5th meeting of Linguistics Beyond and Within International Linguistics Conference, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin “The Outskirts of the Regular”, 18-19 October, 2017.
- Ganfi V. & Masia V. (in prep.). Towards a pragmatic account of the particle persino/perfino in Italian: steps of a grammaticalization process.
- Piciucco, E., Masia, V., Maiorana, E., Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Campisi, P. (submitted). Assessing word-class constraints on Information Structure processing: evidence from event-related potentials and brain oscillatory dynamics.
- Garassino, D., Masia, V. & Brocca, N. (submitted). Tweet as you speak. Relation between implicit categories and their pragmatic functions in a diamesic comparison, paper submitted to Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata.
- Masia, V. (accepted). (Re-)assessing the status of Second Occurrence Focus in information structure: evidence from phonological, processing and micropragmatic perspectives, paper submitted to the Italian Journal of Linguistics.
- Lombardi Vallauri, E. & Masia, V. (in press). L’information implicite entre économie d’effort et esquive du jugement critique, submitted to Faits de Langues.
- Masia, V. (submitted). Presupposition, assertion and the encoding of evidentiality in political discourse.
Unpublished papers:
- Agentivity construction in a cognitive-semantic approach: a typological inquiry.
- Information Structure and the encoding of evidentiality.
- Accommodation strengths of presupposition triggers in discourse.
- Second Occurrence Focus: what information structure?
Subjects studied at university:
General Linguistics (Phonology, Lexis, Semantics, Syntax, Pragmatics, Typology), Historical Linguistics, English Linguistics and Literature, English Language, Germanic Philology, History of English Language, Spanish Linguistics, Spanish Language, Hispano-American Literature, French Linguistics, French Language, Language Teaching, Cultural Anthropology, Geography, Contemporary History, Philosophy of Language, Italian Linguistics and Literature, History of Italian Language.
Research Interests:
Brain-language interface, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, experimental methods in language processing, experimental perspectives on Information Structure, implicit communication, presupposition vs. assertion processing, topic vs- focus processing, evidentiality, epistemic attitudes in communication, Information Structure and evidentiality, evolution of Information Structure in human communication, cognitive mechanisms of persuasion, sociobiology of indirect communication, Celtic linguistics, sign languages, implicit communication on Twitter.
Language skills:
- Italian (native speaker)
- English: proficiency level
- French: good writing and speaking abilities (B1/B2)
- Spanish: good writing and speaking abilities (B1)
- Italian Sign Language
Computer skills:
Good knowledge of Windows Office (earlier and latest versions), web navigation and other tools of Windows operating system.
Languages studied at university:
- English
- French
- Spanish