Giovanni Roversi

Hi! I’m Giovanni (he/him), a 4th year PhD student in linguistics at MIT.

Most of my work deals with morphology, syntax, and their interactions.
I often work on underresearched languages, and I’ve conducted fieldwork with native speakers on Äiwoo (Oceanic), North Sámi (Uralic), and Passamaquoddy (Algonquian).

I’m also a member of the Language Acquisition Lab at MIT.
Some of the topics I’ve worked on include:

• Agreement: what kind of theory do we need to model complex agreement systems?
• Possession: how is this semantic notion mapped onto the syntax of different languages?
• Language acquisition: what kind of grammatical rules can(’t) children acquire?
• Artificial intelligence: what are large language models really doing, and how do they differ from humans
• Argument structure/voice: how do we tell who does what to whom?
• Affix order: how do we stack morphemes onto each other?

Outside of academia, as a hobby I play the piano – I have an amateur-ish jazz training, so I should be able to comp if given chords – and sing.

I’m originally from Correggio, a small town in Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy. I have also lived in Norway for many years, and specifically Northern Norway is my second home.