Domenico
Pardo
Contact
Areas of expertise
Biography
I am a doctoral researcher in the Doctoral Programme in Languages and Translation Studies (Utuling) at the University of Turku, where I also work as a University Teacher of Italian. I hold an MA in Italian Philology (subject teacher education) from the University of Helsinki, where I also studied Finnish language and culture and education. I chair the Association of Italian Teachers in Finland and collaborate with the Italian Cultural Institute and the Embassy of Italy.
Teaching
I teach Italian at the University of Turku. In my teaching I connect research and language education – grammatical gender, for instance, is a real challenge for Finnish-speaking learners of Italian.
Research
My doctoral research focuses on Finnish–Italian language contact. I study how Italian speakers assign grammatical gender to Finnish words such as mökki, pulla or puuro when they use them in Italian. Finnish has no grammatical gender, whereas every Italian noun needs one – so speakers must make a choice that does not exist in the source language. I am particularly interested in the role of phonological cues, semantic analogies and the language practices of the Italian community in Finland. My article-based dissertation combines questionnaires, an eye-tracking experiment and sociolinguistic analysis. The project builds on my Master’s thesis (University of Helsinki, 2023).