Research

My broad research interests

My research interests are broad and interdisciplinary, centring on four key areas: culture, translation, new media, and linguistics. Currently, I am exploring the evolution of language in multimodal works such as children’s literature, comic books, and video games. Through my teaching, I have also developed other interests in language contact and historical linguistics topics. Throughout the years, my research has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including an AHRC Doctoral Award and a Research Fellowship at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Overall, I am particularly interested in the use of nonsensical language that relies on aesthetic properties rather than solely on referential meaning - such as sound symbolism (i.e. onomatopoeia, ideophones), invented/constructed languages and fictional scripts - especially when they are featured in multimodal works that merge textual and visual features.

My PhD journey

My doctoral work elucidated the diachronic translation of sound symbolic forms (ideophones, onomatopoeias and interjections) through the creation of a manually compiled corpus spanning 80 years of linguistic usage in Italian and English in comic books. The results of the investigation shed light on several linguistic and cultural processes that had not been detected in the past. A revealing finding, for instance, was the fact that, even during the years of Mussolini’s ban on Anglophone material in Italy (1942-43), English sound symbolic words were still found in the pages of magazines for children almost as if those forms were not even considered as being English after all. The change in the use of certain translation strategies for sound symbolic forms was found to be influenced by other historical vicissitudes: (1) the arrival of technological advances post-1990s, for instance, caused a surge in the number of ideophonic forms that were localised; (2) two decades before this, in the 1970s, the localisation rate was by contrast at its lowest - possibly due to the crisis that the Italian comic book was facing at the time due to the boom in television sets in households throughout the peninsula. 

My analysis also focused on the sensorial meanings attached to specific vocalic and consonantal sounds and how this phono-semantic synergy is effectively employed when creating and perceiving multimodal work that, culturally and historically, is inherently expressive and entertaining (i.e., literature for young readers). 

Several articles on my doctoral and subsequent work have been published in peer-reviewed journals throughout the years (see the ‘Publications’ section on this website). 

My current projects

I like to focus on a few projects at a time. At the moment, these are the projects that are keeping me busy:

Research Articles:

• The role of artificial languages and cultures in videogames

• Conlangs and language change

• A comparative analysis of visual-driven semantic change in logographic and alphabetic languages (English, Japanese and Chinese)

• Representing archaeolinguistics and language deciphering in adventure video games 

Books: 

I am currently writing my first book on stylistics and historical linguistics, under contract with Bloomsbury (more info on the project here).

• In April 2025 I carried out bibliographic and archival research for the projects above and was based at the Library of Congress (USA)

For any queries about research collaborations, please get in touch by clicking on the 'Contacts' section.