Erica Autelli is the head of the projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2 and a Senior PostDoc researcher at the Department of Romance Studies as well as the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Innsbruck. She has worked with several phraseological projects and institutions, taught for the University of Innsbruck’s Department of Language Didactics (IMoF) as well as several middle and high schools. She wrote her PhD thesis (evaluated with honours) on Il genovese poetico attraverso i secoli and was also part of the scientific committee responsible for reforming the bilingualism exam in South Tyrol from 2017 to 2019. She has received several grants for her research and teaching: among others, the Richard und Emmy Bahr-Stiftung in Schaffhausen 2012 and the Uberto Rivarola 2017 prizes, and lately also the Lehreplus-Preis Digitale Medien 2018 as well as the Lehreplus-Preis Studierende 2018. Being the leader of the GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2 projects, she is responsible for its structure, coordination, content and academic outcome. At the time being she is also Lecturer of General Linguistics at the University of Sassari.
Christine Konecny is an Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Innsbruck. She has gained extensive experience in the field of phraseology and the area of collocation research in particular. Her dissertation about collocations (Kollokationen: Versuch einer semantisch-begrifflichen Annäherung und Klassifizierung anhand italienischer Beispiele), submitted in 2007 and published in 2010, won the award Preis der Landeshauptstadt Innsbruck für wissenschaftliche Forschung an der Universität Innsbruck 2008 and the prestigeous Premio Giovanni Nencioni 2012 awarded by the Accademia della Crusca, among others. In 2015, she finished her postdoctoral lecturer qualification (Habilitation) with a thesis entitled Von Lexemkombinationen zu Appositionen: Syntagmatische Verbindungen zwischen freiem Sprachgebrauch und Formelhaftigkeit. Due to her expertise in phraseology, she has been part of the EUROPHRAS society’s executive board as its treasurer since 2016. Within the GEPHRAS project, she is mainly responsible for the structure of the dictionary entries, for assigning phrasemes to specific subtypes as well as helping to find the Italian equivalents of Genoese phrasemes.
Language consultant Alessandro Guasoni. As one of the main figures of modern Genoese literature, he has written and published several volumes of poetical works and short stories; moreover, he has edited columns for several Italian journals about poetry in minority languages. He has also written an anthology related to nineteenth-century Ligurian poetry, which is currently in press. Within the GEPHRAS and the GEPHRAS2 projects, he is a consultant in the search for the potential equivalent Genoese forms for a specific selection of Italian phrasemes.
Riccardo Imperiale worked as a researcher at the Institute for Romance Languages and Literatures at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf from 2016 to February 2023. In 2016, his Master's thesis Die Funktionsklasse der "segnali discorsivi" des Italienischen (The functional class of “segnali discorsivi” in Italian) was published as a monograph by the publishing house Peter Lang-Verlag. He is currently working as a co-editor on the publication of the first handbook on Italian phraseology. Since April 2023, he has been working as a staff member of the GEPHRAS2 project at the University of Innsbruck, where he is a co-author and his responsibilities include selecting lemmas, conducting dictionary research of phraseological word compounds, as well as creating IPA transcriptions and audio recordings for the individual entries.
Fiorenzo Toso is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sassari. Besides his interest in etymology and linguistic contact phenomena (connected in particular to the Mediterranean area), he is a specialist in Ligurian dialectology, to which he has dedicated a wide range of articles and volumes throughout his whole career. Within the GEPHRAS project, in addition to acting as supervisor and official international partner, he is responsible for including selected historical Genoese phrasemes documented in literature from the Middle Ages to 1814: this material is extracted from a historical-etymological dictionary, which is currently in press (Dizionario etimologico-storico genovese e ligure).
GEPHRAS2 IT support: Simon Triendl. He is a computer science bachelor's student in the final stage of his studies and is currently writing his final thesis on "Simulation of Distributed Workflows". He is responsible for the further development of Maximilian Mayerl's work, in particular for the maintenance, improvement and extension of the project.
Illustrator: Matteo Merli. He is a well-known Ligurian artist, who has had a long career in the Genoese music scene as a singer and interpreter of both traditional and new compositions. He has also worked as an illustrator for Genoese-related didactical works as well as school and children’s books, among others.
Many thanks also to Christina Scharf for her help with the translations into English, to Bruna Pedemonte for the registration of the sample sentences and to the trainees Ana Berking, Sofia Bresich, Paul Luigi Galli, Marco Rivadossi and Elisa Settimi.
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Former collaborators
Data processing support in GEPHRAS: Maximilian Mayerl. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in 2017 and is currently working on his Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck. His main academic interest lies in natural language processing; in particular, issues such as part-of-speech tagging, sentence parsing, and morphological analysis. Within the GEPHRAS project, he is in charge of developing the database as well as the web-based user interface of the dictionary.
(Till June 2022) Stefano Lusito graduated with honours in Translation and Interpreting with a dissertation titled Trasposizione di testi fra codici di diverso prestigio: la traduzione letteraria in genovese, related to the history and techniques of translation into Genoese from the Middle Ages to the present day. His research interests range from Italian dialectology (in particular connected to his region of origin) to the sphere of translation (related to the description of different grammatical structures and the investigation of specific cultural elements) and lexicography. Within the GEPHRAS(2) project, he collected the Genoese and Italian content comprised in the dictionary, researching the terms, translating them, registering audio files of the phrasemes and trascribing their pronunciation.