Francesco Attruia is a senior researcher at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics. In 2013, he obtained a PhD in French Linguistics from the University of Brescia and the Université de Lorraine (France). His research interests include the varieties of French in Canada, lexical semantics, indexical expressions and modalities in both native digital speech and literary texts. His latest book, published by L’Harmattan, is dedicated to the issue of meaning in the work of the Canadian novelist and playwright Michel Tremblay, by paying particular attention to the semantics of silence and the implicit, as well as to the discursive representation of collective identities.