Sarah Rossi
I'm a 3rd year PhD Candidate in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics at
IUSS Pavia (Italy) under the supervision of
Prof. Cristiano Chesi and Prof. Adriana Belletti.
My research mainly revolves around the syntax of imperative clauses (but see below for more details!). I work within the framework of generative grammar, combining formal theory with first language
acquisition data, corpus studies, and computational methods.
I am a member of the NeTS Lab
(Laboratory for Neurolinguistics, Computational Linguistics and Theoretical Syntax),
directed by Prof. Cristiano Chesi.
Beyond my research, I enjoy running, yoga, crochet, crafting handmade jewellery 💍, reading fiction and poetry, and occasionally writing poems of my own 📖✍️.
Get in touch: sarah.rossi@iusspavia.it
Research Interests
Theoretical syntax
Morphosyntax of imperatives, exploring the hypothesis that they are radically reduced structures ● Analysis of expletive vs. standard negation.
Language Acquisition
Development of L1 grammar investigated through corpus studies and computational approaches ● Acquisition in Children vs. Learning in Machines.
Interfaces with Semantics and Pragmatics
Interpretation of imperatives ● Non-canonical uses of imperative clauses ● Expressive language in expletive negation clauses.
Selected Publications
Not-ACC-ing and not-NOM-that constructions: A Comparative Study of English and Italian Expletive Negation.
Sarah Rossi, Cristiano Chesi, Matteo Greco
Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 1–37 • 2025
Different Ways to Forget: Linguistic Gates in Recurrent Neural Networks.
Cristiano Chesi, Veronica Bressan, Matilde Barbini, Achille Fusco, Maria Letizia Piccini Bianchessi, Sofia Neri, Sarah Rossi, Tommaso Sgrizzi
Proceedings of the 2nd BabyLM Challenge at CoNLL 2024, pp. 106–117 • 2024
Italian/Romance imperatives as radically reduced structures: a corpus CHILDES study.
Sarah Rossi
Rivista di Grammatica Generativa, 45(5), pp. 1–39 • 2023
News
Talk accepted at the 6th International Workshop on Syntactic Cartography
July 2025
I'll be presenting my work on Italian negative and generic imperatives in Hong Kong this October.
Read moreWebsite launched 🎉
July 2025
Excited to share my new academic website! Built with Astro + Tailwind CSS.