Giuseppe Samo
Associate Professor in Linguistics at
Beijing Language and Culture University (北京语言大学语言学系)
Department of Linguistics
Research Associate
IDIAP research center
Academic Year 2024-2025 teachings:
语言与人工智能 (Linguistic Theory and AI)
语言习得 (Language Acquisition)
语言学实验：技术与方法 (Linguistic Data: experimental methods and technologies)
语言理论和语言实验方法 (Linguistic Data, Experimental Methods and Theory of Grammar)
历史句法和语言 (Historical Syntax and Language Change)
Publications & Academic Activities
PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
Samo, G. (2019) A Criterial Approach to the Cartography of V2, John Benjamins Publishing, ISBN 9789027204486.
https://benjamins.com/catalog/la.257
Articles
54. Giuseppe Samo & Xu Chen (to appear) "When Cartography meets Transformers: a study on Syntactic Locality and the functional lexicon in Chinese wh-questions", in Cartographic representations at the interfaces, ed. Si Fuzhen, Luigi Rizzi, Oxford University Press.
53. Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "A computational cartographic study on the merge nature of Topics in stages of French", Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique.
52. Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "Adverbs and non-arguments in the left periphery: a computational cartographic study". In Adverbs and particles at the form-meaning interface, ed. Marco Coniglio, Kalle Müller, and Markus Steinbach, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
51. Paola Merlo & Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "Generative Computational Modeling", in The Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, ed. by Evelina Leivada and Kleanthes K. Grohmann, Cambridge University Press.
50. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (to appear) "Extracting Toponyms from OpenStreetMap and Other Gazetteers: Comparing representational accuracy in multilingual contexts", Nature - Humanities and Social Science Communications.
49. Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (to appear) "Large language models, frame semantics and geodialectal data", in N. Saramandu, M.Nevaci, I. Floarea, I-M. Farca¸s, A. Bojoga, F. R. Constantin, A. Loizo, M. Manta, M. Morcov, O. Niculescu (eds), Proceedings of the Xth Congress 1 of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics, Edizioni dell'Orso Alessandria, 585-598.
48. Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2024). "Dictionnaire et atlas: propriétés lexicales et sémantiques des urbanonymes en français", Onoma 59, 277– 303. DOI: 10.34158/ONOMA.59/2024/14
47. Giuseppe Samo & Elena Isolani (2024) "Comparing Models on the Optionality of Complementizer Omission A Quantitative Computational Study on German and Italo-Romance", Annali di Ca' Foscari. Serie occidentale, 58(58), 287-308
46. Giuseppe Samo (2024) "Costruire automaticamente dati sintetici con modelli linguistici di grandi dimensioni per comprendere l'apprendimento dell'alternanza verbale causativa in italiano", In Il verbo in Italiano: Morfologia, sintassi, semantica e testualità, ed. Letizia Lala and Enrico Castro, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 227-240.
45. Vivi Nastase, Giuseppe Samo, Chunyang Jiang & Paola Merlo (2024) "Exploring Italian Sentence Embeddings Properties through Multi-tasking", Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2024), 1 - 10.
44. Vivi Nastase, Giuseppe Samo, Chunyang Jiang & Paola Merlo (2024) "Exploring syntactic information in sentence embeddings through multilingual subject-verb agreement", Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2024), 1 - 13.
43. Chunyang Jiang, Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase & Paola Merlo (2024), BLM-It — Blackbird Language Matrices for Italian: A CALAMITA Challenge, CALAMITA - Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2024), 1 - 9.
42. Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2024) "The Semantics of generic terms in toponyms: Formal Semantics meets multi-source Big Data", Proceedings of GeoExT 2024: Second International Workshop on Geographic Information Extraction from Texts at ECIR 2024, March 24, Glasgow, Scotland, 1-12.
41. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2024), "Italian Places in Japanese Manga: a study on topophilia in graphic narratives", Journal of Literary Semantics, 53(1):39-65.
40. Giuseppe Samo & Paola Merlo (2024) "Distributed computational models of intervention effects: a study on cleft structures in French", in It-Clefts: Empirical and Theoretical Surveys and Advances, ed. by Adam Ledgeway and Caterina Bonan, De Gruyter, 157-180.
39. Simone Sulpizio, Fritz Günther, Linda Badan, Benjamin Basclain, Marc Brysbaert, Yuen Lai Chan, Laura Anna Ciaccio, Carolin Dudschig, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Fabio Fasoli, Ludovic Ferrand, Dušica Filipović Đurević, Ernesto Guerra, Geoff Hollis, Remo Job, Khanitin Jornkokgoud, Hasibe Kahraman, Naledi Kgolo-Lotshwao, Sachiko Kinoshita, Julija Kos, Leslie Lee, Nala H. Lee, Ian Grant Mackenzie, Milica Manojlović, Christina Manouilidou, Mirko Martinic, Maria del Carmen Méndez, Ksenija Mišić, Natinee Na Chiangmai, Alexandre Nikolaev, Marina Oganyan, Patrice Rusconi, Giuseppe Samo, Chi-shing Tse, Chris Westbury, Peera Wongupparaj, Melvin J. Yap & Marco Marelli (2024) "Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study", Behavior Research Methods 56, 3794–3813.
38. Giuseppe Samo (2023) "Testing Cartographic Proposals on Locality Effects in V2: a quantitative study", Journal of Historical Syntax 7 (24), 1-32.
37. Angelapia Massaro & Giuseppe Samo (2023), "Prompting Metalinguistic Awareness in Large Language Models: ChatGPT and Bias Effects on the Grammar of Italian and Italian Varieties", Verbum 14.
36. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "A Semantic Model for Generic Terms and Place Nouns", Spatial Data Science Symposium 2023 Proceedings, UC Santa Barbara.
35. Giuseppe Samo & Caterina Bonan (2023) "Health-related content in Transformer-based language models Exploring bias in domain general vs. domain specific training sets", Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 302, 743-744. doi: 10.3233/SHTI230252.
34. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "Extracting Toponyms from OpenStreetMap: A cross-linguistic perspective", Proceedings of GeoExt '23.
33. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "The Purple Thread: The reception of Prince as a fictional character in graphic narratives", Studies in Comics 13 (1-2), 87 - 113.
32. Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2023), "Geographical Maps meet Place Names where Languages meet Dialects: The Case of Italian", Forum Italicum, 57(3), 1019-1040
31. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023), "Cyberpunk, steampunk and all that punk: Genre names and their uses across communities", Linguistic Vanguard (9) 3, 317-327.
30. Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase, Chunyang Jiang & Paola Merlo (2023), "BLM-s/lE: A structured dataset of English spray-load verb alternations for testing generalization in LLMs", Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, Singapore, Association for Computational Linguistics, 12276–12287.
29. Paola Merlo, Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase & Chunyang Jiang (2023) "Building structured synthetic datasets: The case of Blackbird Language Matrices (BLMs)", proceedings of the Proceedings of the Ninth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (Clic-It 2023 ), 1-11.
28. Paola Merlo, Chunyang Jiang, Giuseppe Samo & Vivi Nastase (2023) "Blackbird Language Matrices Tasks for Generalization", in Proceedings of the 1st GenBench Workshop on (Benchmarking) Generalisation in NLP, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics, 163–172.
27. Qin Xie, Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2023) "Urbanonyms in Macao", Names: A Journal of Onomastics 71(1):29-43.
26. Giuseppe Samo, Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Serena Crocchi (2023), "From health to wellness and back to health? Diachronic trends on Italian thermal towns: a quantitative study", in IX Col´oquio Internacional Olhares sobre o Envelhecimento (IXCIOSE) 28–29 de novembro de 2022, Trabalhos Selecionados, ed. Aline Bazenga, Celina Martins & Minh Ha Lo-Cicero (Organizadoras), 194-205
25. Giuseppe Samo (2022) "Moved to ModP or base-generated in FrameP? A Quantitative Cartographic Study", Revue Roumaine de Linguistique LXVII (4), 345–361.
24. Niels Boogers Linda Badan, Giuseppe Samo & Gaetano Fiorin (2022) "The linear structure of narrative figures in the Saint Francis Cycle: A linguistic analysis" Social Semiotics, 1-34. DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2022.2080544.
23. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2022) "The Interpretation of Urbanonyms in Dis course Reconciling theoretical accounts with experimental results", Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 58(2), 263-288.
22. Paola Merlo & Giuseppe Samo (2022) "Exploring T3 Languages with quantitative computational syntax", Theoretical Linguistics, n. 48.
21. Giuseppe Samo (2022) "Criterial V2: ModP as a locus of microvariation in Swiss Romansh varieties", Probus (34), 143-170.
20. Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuseppe Samo (2022) "Names for urban places and conceptual tax onomies: the view from Italian", Spatial Cognition & Computation. DOI: 10.1080/13875868.2021.1954186
19. Luigi Rizzi & Giuseppe Samo (2022) "Introduction: On the role of Romance in cartographic studies", Probus (34), 1-8.
18. Giuseppe Samo & Fuzhen Si (2022) "Optionality of 的 DE in Chinese Possessive Structures: A Quantitative Study". Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali, 2022, 37-53.
17. Giuseppe Samo, Caterina Bonan & Fuzhen Si (2022) "Health-related content in transformer-based deep neural network language models: exploring cross-linguistic syntactic bias", Studies in health technology and informatics vol. 295 (2022): 221-225.
16. Giuseppe Samo, Yu Zhao, Maria Teresa Guasti, Heini Utunen, Oliver Stucke & Gaya Gamhewage (2022) "Could linguistic complexity be automatically evaluated? A multilingual study on WHO's Emergency Learning Platform" Informatics and Technology in Clinical Care and Public Health. J. Mantas et al. (Eds.), 196 - 199.
15. Giuseppe Samo & Massimiliano Canuti (2022) "Note su infiniti flessi in chianino: un approccio cartografico", Annali di Ca' Foscari. Serie occidentale (56), 1-18.
14. Giuseppe Samo & Francesco-Alessio Ursini (2022) "Exploring dynamic on-line gazetteers to map variation in the syntax of Italian urbanonyms", Quaderni di Lavoro ASIT 24, 407-423.
13. Giuseppe Samo, Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Giuliano Caracciolo, (2022) "Quantifying formulaic syntax: a quantitative and computational study on temporal complements in Latin subject relatives extracted from the Epigraphic collection of the Catacombs in Chiusi", Annali di Linguistica, Universit`a Orientale, Naples, Italy.
12. Giuseppe Samo & Giuliano Caracciolo (2022) "Encoding inscriptions as sets of lexical features: a case study on the Epigraphic collection of the Catacombs in Chiusi", Res Antiquae 19, 1-18.
11. Giuseppe Samo & Paola Merlo (2021) "Intervention effects in clefts: a study in quantitative computational syntax", Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 6(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5742
10. Giuseppe Samo (2021) "N-merge systems in adult and child grammars: a quantitative study on external arguments", Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali, 7, 103-130. https://doi.org/10.13128/qulso-2421-7220-12005
9. Yu Zhao, Giuseppe Samo, Heini Utunen, Oliver Stucke & Gaya Gamhewage (2021) "Evaluating Complexity of Digital Learning in a Multilingual Context: A Cross-Linguistic Study on WHO's Emergency Learning Platform", Evaluating Complexity of Digital Learning in a Multilingual Context: A Cross-Linguistic Study on WHO's Emergency Learning Platform 281, 516-517. doi: 10.3233/SHTI210222.
8. Giuseppe Samo & Massimiliano Canuti (2021) Uncovering the Left Periphery of Etruscan: some theoretical insights, in F. Si and L. Rizzi, Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography: A crosslinguistic perspective, John Benjamins Publishing.
7. Giuseppe Samo, Yu Zhao & Gaya Gamhewage (2020) "Syntactic Complexity of Learning Content in Italian for COVID-19 Frontline Responders: A Study on WHO's Emergency Learning Platform", Verbum, 2020, vol. 11, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15388/Verb.15
6. Giuseppe Samo & Paola Merlo (2019) Intervention effects in object relatives in English and Italian: a study in quantitative computational syntax, Proceedings of Quasy, Association for Computational Linguistics, 46 - 56.
5. Giuseppe Samo (2019), Cartography and Microparametric variation: Criterial V2 in Swiss Romansh varieties, Revista Lingu´ıstica, v.15.3, 141 -160. https://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2019.v15n3a27546
4. Giuseppe Samo (2019) "Cartography and Locality in German: a quantitative study with Dependency structures", Rivista di Grammatica Generativa/Research in Generative Grammar, 5, 1-26.
3. Giuseppe Samo (2018) "Towards a Criterial V2: Some Notes on Subject-initial Clauses", Generative Grammar in Geneva. 2018, vol. 11, 1 - 20.
2. Giuseppe Samo (2018). A Criterial approach to the Cartography of V2, PhD dissertation, University of Geneva
1. Hasmik Jivanyan & Giuseppe Samo (2017) "Parce-que in the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface", Generative Grammar in Geneva, vol. 10, University of Geneva. doi:10.13097/1tk2-7fja
PhD Dissertation
Samo G. 2018, A Criterial approach to the Cartography of V2, PhD dissertation, University of Geneva. https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:108925 (listed as 2 in the publication)
Editor
Samo G., Martini K. & Bocci G., (ed.s), 2018, Proceedings of the 1st SynCart workshop, Special Issue GG@G vol.11, University of Geneva.
https://www.unige.ch/lettres/linge/syntaxe/journal/volume_onze_2018.html
POSTERS & PRESENTATIONS
2022
Testing the generalisation ability of cartographic models in accounting V2: a quantitative study on grammatical clauses, 24.08.2022 Societas Lingusitica Europea 2022, Workshop: WO change, University of Bucharest -"Iorgu Iordan - Al. Rosetti" Institute of Linguistics.
(with Si Fuzhen) Quantifying Optionality of Chinese Possessive Marker 的 de and some theoretical Insights/ 汉语领属标记"的"可选性的量化分析及理论思考, Isoctal, University of Leeds, 20-21.06.2022
Quantifying the cartography and locality of ModP in large-scale and small-sized datasets, AAFMI Goettingen, 19.05.2022
Some notes on the syntax of negation in Etruscan, IUSS Pavia LS Seminars, 28.03.2022
2021
Avoiding Intervention effects across grammars: some quantitative results, 1st IFOLAB, Beijing Language and Culture University, 03.11.2021.
Quantifying criterial and meaningless movement: exploring cartographic results with large-scale datasets, Zoom na Cartografia, 15.07.2021.
Syntactic Theory and Machine Learning: predicting frequencies. China University of Mining and Technology - Beijing 中国矿业大学, 16.06.2021
Relativized Minimality and frequencies in Universal Dependencies treebanks, SyntaxLab, University of Cambridge, 15.06.2021.
Machine Learning and syntactic theory: focus on German and German varieties, 43. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (43rd Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society), Workshop "Contrastive Corpus Methodology for Language Modeling and Analysis", Freiburg am Brisgau, Germany, 26.02.2021
External arguments: preference for 2-merge or 3-merge systems? A quantitative crosslinguistic analysis in child and adult grammar corpora, IGG 46, Siena (postponed to 17-19.02.2021).
2020
Movement and Locality in the Cartography of Germanic: a quantitative study with dependency structures, DiaLing, Ghent University, 11th December 2020.
(with Yu Zhao, Gaya Gamhewage, Heini Utunen, Oliver Stucke) Evaluating complexity of digital learning in a multilingual context: a cross-linguistic study on WHO's emergency learning platform, poster presentation, Global Digital Health Forum 2020, 7-9 December 2020.
Cartography meets Quantitative Computational Syntax, Colóquios do ForMA LaCaSa- Laboratório de Cartografia Sintática: Pesquisa e Ensino, UniCampinas, 12.05.2020
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZkwUDaCMkE&fbclid=IwAR3Sv-xfipfKaLVwPHuUllqk31xujuSbQS9RdU7xMiF2-h53Bfh-LYaPDi8
Cartography, reorderings and locality in Germanic: a quantitative study, Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique, University of Geneva, 11.02.2020
2019
Quantitative Cartographic Syntax, International Workshop on Syntactic Cartography 2019, Beijing Language and Culture University.
A quantitative approach to syntactic locality: a cross-linguistic analysis of object relatives, 第一届汉外语言文化对比研究国际学术研讨会 - The first international academic seminar on the contrastive study of Chinese and foreign languages and cultures, Beijing Language and Culture University, September 7-9, 2019.
(with Fuzhen Si) A Cartography of Paralinguistic Features and Non-Verbal elements: some preliminary notes on experimental designs, Workshop "Brain, Language & Learning", University of Siena, September 26-28, 2019. (Poster)
(with Paola Merlo)Intervention effects in object relatives in English and Italian: a study in quantitative computational syntax, Proceedings of the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2019), Association for Computational Linguistics, 46 - 56.
V2 languages do not challenge Cartography, if the analysis follows Cartographic guidelines, Oberseminar English Linguistics (Syntax-Semantics), Georg-August Universität Göttingen.
The role of morphosyntactic features and the Left Periphery: evidence from V2 languages, Unbound Seminars in Formal Linguistics (UnboundSFL), University of Geneva.
Time/Space - Subject - V3: the predictive power of a criterial approach to V2, Team goes to IGG, Incontro di Grammatica Generativa 45, University of Padua.
V2 languages do not challenge the split-CP: the predictive power of a criterial approach, Traces of History, University of Oslo.
2018
V2 languages do not challenge Cartography: a Criterial Approach to V2, International Forum on Frontiers in Linguistics, Beijing Language and Culture University.
V2 and Cartographic guidelines, Seminari di Ricerca del CISCL, University of Siena.
2017
Criterial V2 and Embedded Clauses:some notes on German and Swiss Romansh varieties, Wordshop, University of Zurich.
Towards a Criterial V2, VariaForMea, Magglingen/Macolin
Some notes on Subjects and the Left of SwissRomansh varieties, Microworkshop in Romance, University of Geneva.
Cartography of V2: Towards a Criterial V2, SemRec UniGe 07.11.2017, University of Geneva.
Cartography of V2, 61. Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft, University of Zurich
2016
The SynCart website (talk, with Karen Martini), 1st SynCart workshop, 11 - 15.07.2016, Chiusi (Italy)
The role of FinP in the Left Periphery, 9e Journées de linguistique suisse (9th Days of Swiss Linguistics), 29-30.06 - 1.07. 2016, University of Geneva.
The Left Periphery of Swiss Romansh: toward a Criterial Approach to V2, Seminar, Goethe Universität Frankfurt.
Hanging Topics with Case Marking do not violate the "Bottleneck Effect" (poster), Rethinking V2 workshop, 22 - 24.03.2016, University of Cambridge
Icelandic V3 adverbs do not violate the "Bottleneck Effect" (poster), IGG42, 18 - 20.02.2016, University of Lecce.
2015
Notes on FinP as landing site for V2, Traces of History workshop, 09,10.03.2015, University of Oslo. 2014
V2 and Cartography, VariaForMea, Magglingen
A cartographic approach to Verb Second, 7. Österreichische Studierendenkonferenz der Linguistik, 21, 22.11.2014, University of Salzburg.
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Rivista di Grammatica Generativa: research in Generative Grammar (2014 -)
REVIEWER
Word Order in the Left Periphery, Workshop, University of Oslo; IGG46.
Indexed Journals.
COORDINATOR
Webinars "Linguistic Connections" (University of Geneva, then Beijing Language and Culture University)
"Move and Merge: Seminar in Linguistics at the BLCU", Beijing Language and Culture University.
ASSOCIATION
Commitee Member of the International Association of Syntactic Cartography (based in Macao)
ONGOING PROJECTS:
深度学习分析矢量表示中的句法制图结构编码 (Encoding syntactic structures as vectorial representations for deep learning), Science Foundation of Beijing Language and Culture University (supported by "the fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities") #20YBB06.
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