Luigi Rizzi

Rizzi is an international leader in generative syntax, and has influenced both Chomsky and generations of younger scholars. He has made seminal contributions in syntactic theory, the comparative syntax of Romance and Germanic languages, and the acquisition of syntax. His theory of Relativized Minimality redefined locality in syntax, and his contributions to the parametric approach and the syntactic cartography reinvigorated comparative syntax. His ground-breaking cross-linguistic experimental work with Belletti and other colleagues explores the acquisition and processing of syntactic configurations. The fruitfulness of that work has had a positive impact on the incorporation of experimental psycholinguistic work into linguistic theorizing.