PhD Students

Marco Segata is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Trento, where his research project, titled Il Tedesco trentino: lineamenti di una varietà storica tra diacronia e diatopia (The German of Trento: outlines of a historical variety between diachrony and diatopy), focuses on the language of the historical German-speaking community in Trentino. His work examines the main peculiarities of this linguistic variety combining diachronic (temporal) and diatopic (geographical) perspectives.

He earned his master’s degree in Euro-American Literatures, Translation, and Literary Criticism at the University of Trento. His thesis, Das italienische gerundio in deutschen Übersetzungen: eine kontrastive Studie auf der Grundlage mehrdeutiger Fälle (The Italian gerundio in German translations: A contrastive study based on ambiguous cases), analyzed the challenges of translating the Italian gerundio into German through ambiguous examples. This work was developed and written during a research stay at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

In addition to his academic studies, he completed an internship at the Mòcheno Cultural Institute in Palù del Fersina, where he contributed to the revision and updating of the Mòcheno language vocabulary, supporting the preservation of this minority language spoken in Trentino. His research interests combine historical linguistics, dialectology and minority language preservation, contributing to the understanding of Germanic linguistic heritage in Italy and its evolution over space and time.

Monica Menegon is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Trento. Her current research focuses on syntactic similarities between Germanic and Romance languages in Northern Italy and language contact in the Alpine Sprachbund, namely a comparison between Germanic and Romance languages in ‘Doubly-Filled-COMP’ structures.

She obtained her Double Master’s Degree in “Euro-American Literatures, Translation and Literary Criticism” at the University of Trento and in “European Languages” at the Technische Universität Dresden with a thesis titled “Besonderheiten der linken Peripherie im Bairischen. Eine Analyse der Phänomene der emphatischen Topikalisierung und des Doppel-COMPs” (Features of the Bavarian Left Periphery. Analysis of the Emphatic Topicalisation and of the Doubly-Filled COMP).

She has been university tutor in German Linguistics at the University of Trento since 2020 and she is a member of the organising committee of the “Conversazioni Linguistiche”, a series of lectures on linguistics promoted by the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento.

Tasnim Rahman is a PhD candidate at the University of Trento. Her research focuses on English linguistics, with an emphasis on English in Bangladesh. Her work applies the EIF model to explore the historical, social, and cultural dynamics that shape the use of English in Bangladesh. Tasnim examines the evolution of English in the region, analyzing its role in government, education, and business, alongside its complex relationship with Bangla and other regional dialects. Her research highlights the nativization phase of English in Bangladesh, reflecting the country’s postcolonial linguistic scenario.

She obtained her Double Master’s Degree in “Euro-American Literatures, Translation and Literary Criticism” at the University of Trento and in “Literature and Culture in Social Change” at the Technische Universität Dresden, with a thesis titled: “Bangladeshi English as a Variety of Postcolonial Englishes”. Tasnim was awarded an Erasmus Scholarship for her postgraduate internship at the Technische Universität Dresden through the University of Trento.