[3] She has served as President of the International Society for Historical Linguistics (1983–1985), of the Società Italiana di Glottologia (1991–1992), and of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (1999–2000).

[4] In 1986, in collaboration with other colleagues, Giacalone Ramat initiated a project on non-native varieties of Italian.

This became known as the "Project of Pavia" and showed how observing the process of acquisition of Italian as L2 can make a significant contribution to a theory of language and to the understanding of the universal regularities that shape it.

[6] She also played an important role in bringing Italian acquisitional research into contact with European research networks on L2, starting from the 1990s, in particular with the network of the European project "The structure of learner varieties" coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.

[7] Her historical work has dealt with the diachronic development of interphrasal connectives, changes in passive and impersonal constructions in Romance languages, and new perspectives in the theory of grammaticalization.