He was founder and editor of Quaderni di semantica, a journal of theoretical and applied semantics.
He authored hundreds of publications and was a prominent scholar in the field of dialectology.
According to Pavle Ivić, "Alinei is one of the not so numerous European linguists who already in the early sixties were willing and able to apply the results of technological innovations to the study of language.
"[1] After his retirement, beginning in 1996, Alinei also became known as a proponent of the Paleolithic continuity theory that Indo-European languages originated in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic.
[2] He died in Impruneta, Italy in August 2018, two days shy of his 92nd birthday.