Luigi Rizzi (born 3 June 1952 in

Genoa Genoa ( ; ; ) is a city in and the capital of the Italian region of Liguria, and the sixth-largest city in Italy. As of 2025, 563,947 people live within the city's administrative limits. While its metropolitan city has 818,651 inhabitan ...

) is an Italian

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

. Rizzi is currently a full professor at the

University of Siena The University of Siena (, abbreviation: UNISI), located in Siena, Tuscany, holds the distinction of being Italy's first publicly funded university as well as one of the oldest, originally established as ''Studium Senese'' in 1240. As of 2022, it ...

in Italy. He studied at the

Scuola Normale Superiore The Scuola Normale Superiore (commonly known in Italy as "la Normale") is a public university in Pisa and Florence, Tuscany, Italy, currently attended by about 600 undergraduate and postgraduate (PhD) students. Together with the University of Pi ...

, the

University of Pisa The University of Pisa (, UniPi) is a public university, public research university in Pisa, Italy. Founded in 1343, it is one of the oldest universities in Europe. Together with Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Sant'Anna School of Advanced S ...

and the

University of Paris VIII Paris 8 University (), or usually the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis or Paris 8, is a public university in the Paris Metropolitan Area, Greater Paris, France. Once part of the historic University of Paris, it is now an autonomous public ...

. Before moving to Siena, Rizzi was a full professor at the

University of Geneva The University of Geneva (French: ''Université de Genève'') is a public university, public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1559 by French theologian John Calvin as a Theology, theological seminary. It rema ...

. Rizzi is co-director of the journal ''Rivista di grammatica generativa''. His research is mainly concerned with the theory of syntax and language acquisition, and he has made a notable contribution to the theory of locality, parametric comparative syntax and the cartography of syntactic structures.

Selected bibliography

* ''Issues in Italian Syntax'' (1982). Dordrecht: Foris. * ''Relativized Minimality'' (1990). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. * ''The Structure of CP and IP: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2'' (ed.) (2004). Oxford: OUP.

References

1952 births Living people Linguists from Italy Syntacticians Academic staff of the University of Geneva Academic staff of the University of Siena University of Pisa alumni University of Paris alumni Developmental psycholinguists Corresponding fellows of the British Academy {{italy-linguist-stub