Professor Adam Ledgeway
College Position
Fellow in Italian
University Position
Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics
Degrees and Honours

BA (Salford), MA (Manchester), PhD (Manchester)

Research Interests

Since completing his PhD at the University of Manchester in 1996 and a Research Fellowship at Downing College (1996-97), Adam Ledgeway has been a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer and then Professor at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include Italian dialectology, the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages (including both standard languages such as Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and lesser known varieties and dialects such as Dalmatian, Galician, Neapolitan, Occitan, Raeto-Romance, Sardinian), Latin, syntactic theory and linguistic change. His research is channelled towards bringing together traditional Romance philological scholarship with the insights of recent generative syntactic theory, and he has worked and published extensively on such topics as alignments, complementation, configurationality, auxiliary selection and split intransitivity, grammaticalization, word order, cliticization, clause structure, verb movement, finiteness, and the development of demonstrative systems.

Recent Research Projects

2015-18: Leverhulme Major Research Grant (£253,863) ‘Fading voices in southern Italy: Investigating language contact in Magna Graecia’ (Ledgeway PI; Schifano: RA; Silvestri: RA).

2015-17: European Commission Marie Curie Actions grant (€183,455) for project ‘Reflexive clitics in Aromanian’ (Ledgeway PI; Mavrogiorgos: RA).

Select Publications

Currently, co-editing the second volume of The Cambridge History of the Romance languages (Volume 2: Contexts), Cambridge: CUP (with M. Maiden and J.C. Smith), The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, Cambridge: CUP (with I Roberts), and the Oxford Handbook of the Romance Languages, Oxford: OUP (with M. Maiden).

2012. From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic typology and change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xxviii + 449 pp.

2011. The Cambridge history of the Romance languages. Volume 1: Structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xxii + 866 pp. (co-edited with Martin Maiden and John Charles Smith).

2010. Syntactic variation: The dialects of Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (co-edited with Roberta D’Alessandro and Ian Roberts).

2009. Grammatica diacronica del napoletano (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie Band 350). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, xxiv + 1045 pp.