Margherita Pallottino holds a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics from the University of Geneva. Her 2020 thesis, written under the direction of Prof. Tabea Ihsane and Prof. Luigi Rizzi, investigates the case marking function of the preposition “fii” in Tunisian Arabic. 

Margherita's research focuses on interdialectal variation among Arabic Varieties. She is particularly interested in the distribution of locative prepositions and of their use in a crosslinguistic perspective.

In July 2022, Margherita joined the OFAI (Österreichisches Forschungsinstitut für Artificial Intelligence - Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence) as post-doc fellow. Her fellowship is sponsored by the FNS Mobility Grant P500PH_211169/1. At the OFAI Margherita is working at the creation of a browsable linguistic atlas describing the polyfunctionality of the prepositions bi and fii across twelve Arabic Dialects, spanning from Moroccan Arabic in the west to Iraqi Arabic in the east. The aim of the research project is the identification of patterns of grammaticalization which allow single prepositional elements to perform a wealth of syntactic functions in closely related languages.

From 2021 to 2023, Margherita worked as Unige coordinator and scientific collaborator on the project UPSKILLS (UPgrading the SKIlls of Linguistics and Language Students) under the supervision of Prof. Genoveva Puskas. The UPSKILLS project is a partnership for higher education co-funded by Erasmus+ and Movetia under the coordination of the University of Malta. The first aim of the project is the identification of skill mismatch between the academic offer for language and linguistics students and the demand of the job market; the second one is the creation and development of curricular components and teaching materials to be embedded in existing study programs.