What is the link between the lack of articles in a language like Polish and the numeral ‘one’? Can an apparently ordinary number like jeden be fascinating from the point of view of a linguist?

Luca Molinari is a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the University of Warsaw, now in co-tutelle with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he got his BA and MA in Language Sciences. His field of study and research is theoretical linguistics, mainly focusing on syntax. He got very interested in Slavic languages in his undergraduate studies after having studied Russian and Bulgarian. Pushed by the desire of adding one more Slavic language in his repertoire and the desire of continuing his study in syntax, he found the perfect solution in a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Warsaw. There he started collaborating with dr hab. Paweł Rutkowski, known in the field of Slavic linguistics among other things for his works on the nominal syntax in Polish and other Slavic languages. At the same time, he started learning Polish “on the field”.

Luca’s project focuses on how the Slavic languages he studied (and is studying) express definiteness and indefiniteness. The choice of the languages is not casual, as each of them is representative of one subgroup in which Slavic is divided: Russian for the eastern group, Bulgarian for the southern, and Polish for the western one. Simplifying a bit, the issue is: in Italian we can easily distinguish “uno studente” from “lo studente” thanks to articles. What about Polish? How to know whether “student” corresponds to “uno studente” or “lo studente”? The question has obviously been discussed by linguists: Luca wants to approach the issue from a comparative perspective, looking at both the Slavic and the Romance context. At the same time, while dealing with these questions he started being interested in how the numeral ‘one’ becomes a means to signal indefiniteness (think of the Italian “un(o)”) trying to understand the syntax of what looks like a simple number.

Luca wants to improve his Polish in the next future and hopes to maintain strict relationships with the Polish academic world and often travel to Poland after his PhD, as he still does not know where his passion for Slavic will take him.

For the moment, Luca has participated to various international conference, presenting the results of his own work and of some collateral research he is conducting together with his colleagues. He has already published several papers which contain the main ideas he is developing, mainly about the numeral jeden in Polish and edin in Bulgarian.