Silvia Cacchiani holds a PhD in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Pisa, Italy (Supervisor: Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi; Title: English Predicate-Intensifier Collocations between Semantics and Pragmatics). Since January 2005, she has been a research fellow in English Language and Translation at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. While the interest in intensification and evaluation led her to move from the semantics and pragmatics of phrasal constructs to complex words, mainly evaluative morphology and extra-grammatical word-formations, her position as a ‘ricercatore di ateneo’ (research fellow and ESP lecturer for more than one department) resulted in work on simplex and complex word as well as phrasal constructs in ESP, and on specialized terminology in particular, with special interest for neology and transparency. Silvia Cacchiani has over 60 publications, primarily around the following topic areas:
- semantics and pragmatics of intensification in simple and complex collocations and in the morphological and phrasal constructs of English and Italian, also addressed with reference to conceptual metaphor an metonymy;
- evaluative and extragrammatical morphology in and cross English and Italian (theories adopted/adapted: Lexical Semantics, Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar; Construction Morphology; Naturalness Theory); implications and applications for language teaching and teacher training;
- also: analogy, schematization and transparency in extragrammatical and grammatical word-formation processes, mainly lexical blending, with special attention to semantic relations; and the influence of English on Italian word formation processes (mostly grammatical and extragrammatical compounding);
- motivation, (re-)conceptualization of terms (e.g. of borrowings and legal transplants) and their semantic transparency;
- text types and genres, with special attention to (practical) instructions, description and evaluation; expert communication (e.g. English and Italian research articles) and knowledge dissemination in old and new genres and media (from PILs through encyclopedic law dictionaries to institutional webpages concerning diverse features of patient information leaflets).
A full list of her publications is available here.
See the other members of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Research Unit.