Guglielmo Cinque - Biography#

Guglielmo Cinque was born in La Spezia in 1948. He attended schools in Venice and the university (Classics and Modern Philology) in Padua, where he graduated in 1971. He then obtained an M.A. in Linguistics in 1973 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Academic career

He was lector of Italian at the University of Edinburgh (1971/72); grantee of a Fulbright fellowship (1972/73), spent at the University of California, Berkeley; "Research assistant" in the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley (September-December 1973); grantee of a fellowship at the University of Padua (1974). Military service (1975). Since 1976 he has held various positions at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, first as adjunct and associate professor, and then as full professor, from 1981. He was Head of the Institute of Linguistics and Language Teaching (1986/87 - 1996/97), Head of the Language Center (1989/90-1994/95), President of the Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere (1981/2 - 1986/87), Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures (1999/2000- 2001/02), Chair of the Department of Language Sciences (2002/03-2007/08), and member of the Academic Senate from 1995/96 to 2007/08. From 2019 on he is Professor Emeritus.

Teaching and research activities

In addition to undergraduate and graduate courses at Ca’ Foscari, he has been Chargé de Cours at the Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes (Spring 1982); Gastprofessor, Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Wien (winter semester 1985/86); Professeur suppléant de linguistique at the Université de Genève (1988/1989); Visiting Professor at Harvard University (February-May 1998), at the University of California, Los Angeles (February-April 2003), Professeur at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris (Fall 2008), Francqui Chair at the University of Brussels (2010/2011), Visiting Professor at New York University (Spring 2014), Shaoul Fellow at the University of Tel Aviv (2015/2016), and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut (Spring 2020). His research interests are: linguistic theory, syntax, Romance linguistics and linguistic typology. From 1997 to 2007 he was part of a project on the “Cartography of Syntactic Structures” funded by the Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica, which included researchers from Ca’ Foscari and the Universities of Florence, Milan, Padua and Siena.