Bio

I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, of a Paraguayan father and an Italian mother, and was raised in a Calabrian-speaking family (Italo-Romance). 

Trained as a linguist at the Université Paris V-René Descartes-Sorbonne and Stanford University, I am currently Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. I am also Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Affiliated Faculty in the Program in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and the Program in Global Studies. In the past I directed the Language Contact and Multilingualism Working Group at UNC and Duke, and the Guaraní Working Group at UNC (funded by the UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies).

My new current project focuses on the creation of the first grammar of Rusitène, an Italo-Romance language from the Alto Ionio Cosentino, in Calabria, southern Italy, of which I am a heritage speaker.  I continue to work on the grammar of Guaraní languages in Paraguay and Argentina (antipassive voice, derivational morphology, nasal harmony), Guarani-Spanish contact, and the syntax of Argentinian Spanish.

Past projects and other interests of mine include first language acquisition in typical and atypical populations, especially autism and fragile X syndrome, and the use of social media data for linguistic analysis.