![]() And then I discovered American Sign Language. ![]() Most of my research was on Italian, not on English, in fact I did very little research on English. You need to present a coherent description of the entire way all the sentences of a language work together, so you need to stick to one language, but I would bounce off talking about other languages, and I used English because here that’s our lingua franca. ![]() Last week, I had the pleasure to sit down for an interview with Professor Napoli in her Swarthmore office, to discuss her linguistic research, mythology, violence in storytelling and imaginatively inhabiting other cultural worlds.Įmma: So first, just for the people that read our blog, can you tell us a little bit about your research in linguistics and maybe give a little bit of background?ĭonna: For many years I did what’s called syntax, which is the analysis of sentence structure and phrase structure and I looked at it very theoretically. ![]() I grew up on her stories, including Sirena (1998), Spinners (2001), Breath (2003) and Beast (2004), enraptured by her fantastical and historical settings, many of which are set in foreign countries or have folkloric elements. ![]() Donna Jo Napoli is a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and the acclaimed author of numerous young adult and children’s books. ![]()
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