Hi, I'm Martín Fuchs, and I am currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. I work on the semantics & pragmatics of various tense-aspect phenomena in Spanish from both a variationist and a diachronic perspective. 

My research uses a combination of experimental methods and corpus studies to understand patterns of synchronic variation rooted in larger principles of semantic change ---that is, I aim to explain how and why form-meaning pairings change in some ways but not in others over time. To this end, I investigate how these principles of meaning change are ultimately based on the cognitive architecture of the linguistic and conceptual systems.

I hold a PhD from Yale Linguistics (2020), where I worked in the Language & Brain Lab. In my dissertation I used different experimental techniques and diachronic corpus studies to look at how different readings of the Imperfective are expressed in different dialects of Spanish through the use of two distinct markers: the Present Progressive and the Simple Present. I showed that dialectal variation is constrained by crosslinguistically atested processes of meaning change, which are rooted in cognitive and communicative pressures of economy and expressivity. My dissertation committee members were María Mercedes Piñango (chair), Veneeta Dayal, Ashwini Deo, and Scott Schwenter.

After my PhD, I was a postdoctoral researcher at UiL-OTS (Utrecht University), working with Henriëtte de Swart and Bert Le Bruyn, where I continued to develop my approach to meaning variation and change by looking at another aspectual domain: the Perfect and its interaction with the (Perfective) Past. On the basis of cross-linguistic parallel corpus research, I developed several experiments to assess the role of different linguistic and extralinguistic factors in the distribution of Perfect and (Perfective) Past forms across Western European languages.

I'm originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina and I did my undergrad at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. During those years, I was part of the Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Lab at the Instituto de Lingüística, where I did some research on the morphosyntactic properties of agrammatism (agreement processing, relative clause comprehension, clitic doubling).