European Commission Research Fellow at the University of Reading, Lecturer in Italian Linguistics at Birmingham, Professor at the University of Genoa within the Italian Government Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca programme against ‘brain-drain’ rientro dei cervelli, Jacqueline Visconti is presently Associate Professor in Italian Linguistics in the Faculty of Lingue e letterature straniere of the Genoa University, as well as Marie Curie Fellow, Socio dell’Accademia della Crusca and Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Birmingham.
After her post-doctoral training in diachronic linguistics at the Universities of Stanford (1999), UCSB (2001) and UC Berkeley (2009), her interests have focused on historical semantics and pragmatics, as documented in her publications in the past ten years, particularly on the role of lexical semantics in interaction with pragmatic factors in driving semantic change (see e.g.. the volume edited with Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen on Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics Studies in Pragmatics, Emerald, 2009).
Her interest in the fields of text- and contrastive linguistics is reflected in her PhD dissertation on complex conditional connectives in Italian and English (such as qualora or supposing), published in 2000 by Edizioni dell’Orso, with a Preface by FBA Giulio C. Lepschy.
Her second main areas of research concerns comparative analysis of legal texts and legal translation, as reflected in her participation in the Rete di Eccellenza dell’Italiano Istituzionale (European Commission) and in her remaining publications (cfr e.g. the edited volume on Lingua e diritto, LED, 2010).
Both research programmes have attracted considerable large-scale funding, notably by the Fonds National pour la Recherche Suisse (1994-1995), the European Commission (1995-1997), the British Academy (1999, 2001), the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (2003-2006 and 2006-2008), the Accademia dei Lincei (2006), the Centro Nazionale per le Ricerche (2009).