Research interests
General
Syntax, syntax-semantics interface, morphosyntax, neoconstructionism, variation and microvariation in Romance languages
Specific
Participles, adjectives, aspect, passives, copulative and pseudo-copulative verbs, Aktionsart, argument structure and relational structures
My research
My interests focus on theoretical syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface. I am interested in the approach to syntax from a neoconstructionist perspective and, specifically, in the proposals developed in the framework of Nanosyntax. In my dissertation, entitled Aspect and argument structure in Catalan passive constructions, I study the syntax and semantics of the different passive constructions of contemporary Catalan, taking into account both dialectal and diachronic variation, and I propose an analysis of passive constructions as lexicalisation patterns of event structure in a nanosyntactic model such as the one proposed by Ramchand (2008, 2018).
The thesis, defended in September 2020, was part of the doctoral program in Cognitive Science and Language of the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. My supervisor was Dr. Gemma Rigau (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and this research was funded by a predoctoral fellowship from the University Teacher Training Program (FPU) of the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.
In 2017, I did a research stay at the University of Tromsø (The Arctic University of Norway – UIT), in Norway, with Antonio Fábregas as my supervisor. From him I can only corroborate what everyone knows: that he is an infinite source of wisdom, that he works at a supernatural rate and that every year publishes more articles than a whole department together. In Tromsø I worked with the members of the CASTL (Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics), to whom I am very grateful for the training I received during my stay.
So far, my desire to receive feedback, to exchange ideas with other colleagues and to receive nourishment from expert linguists, has led me to participate in different national and international conferences and to disseminate my work in various publications.
In addition to the theoretical contributions to formal analysis, I am interested in the study of variation and microvariation in Romance languages, comparative linguistics and the evolution of language.
Research networks
I am a member of NEON (Neoconstructionist approaches to Spanish, Catalan and Basque), an international research network coordinated from UiT Arctic University of Norway and currently involving researchers from different countries in Europe and America, who work on the neo-constructionist analysis of ‘morphological’ objects in Spanish, Basque and Catalan. Recently, I also joined the FARM (Formal Approaches to Romance Microvariation), a research network that involve both senior and junior scholars in formulating research questions on the grammar of Romance varieties.