Marina Nespor (born 3 November 1949 in Milan, Italy) is a Professor of linguistics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy,[1] and senior researcher in the ERC PASCAL Project, a project investigating language acquisition and the nature of the biological endowment that allows humans to learn language.[2] Much of Dr. Nespor's research focuses on the interaction of phonology and syntax: what the prosodic structure of an utterance communicates about its grammatical structure.[1]
Nespor received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977. She was elected as member of the Academia Europaea in 2008.[3] She has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including Lingua, The Linguistic Review, and Linguistics.