Andrea Moro is a professor of general linguistics at the School of Advanced Studies IUSS in Pavia, Italy. He obtained a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Padua. He has been a visiting scientist several times at MIT, first with a Fulbright grant, then at Harvard. He studies the structure of human languages and its relationship with the brain. In the first field, by comparing the syntax of sentences with the verb to be across languages, he discovered symmetry-breaking phenomena in natural languages; in the second, by exploiting neuroimaging techniques, he found that “impossible languages” are ruled out by neurobiological networks rather than cultural conventions; he also explored the relationship between sound and syntax by proving that sound is also represented in inner speech and measured the correlates of basic syntactic structures independently of sound. Among his science trade books are The Boundaries of Babel (2015, MIT Press), Impossible Languages (2016, MIT Press), I Speak Therefore I Am (Columbia University Press, 2016), A Brief History of the Verb to BE (2018, MIT Press) and The Secrets of Words with Noam Chomsky (2022, MIT Press). His first novel Il Segreto di Pietramala (2018, La nave di Teseo), was awarded the “Flaiano International Prize” for Literature in 2018 and has just been translated into English as The Secret of Pietramala (2023).

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