About me

My academic career started with a B.A. in Spanish and a minor in Philosophy from the University of Granada, where I also graduated from the Linguistics Master program, with a master thesis on Metaphor and Relevance Theory. I finished my Ph.D. in the University of Almería and spent one of my graduate years at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My dissertation was on measures of Syntactic Development in adolescents and what social factors influence it.

Awarded with a MEC/Fullbright scholarship, I spent the first year of it at the University of León, working with Professor and Language Academic Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez on Functional Syntax of Spanish complex sentences, and in particular relative clauses. I spent the second year working in the Linguistics Department at UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara), with Professor Sandra Thompson. My research focused on resumptive pronouns in Spanish relative clauses in conversation, along the lines of Functional Discourse Grammar. I have also worked on conversation analysis in a project on very young bilingual children's embodiment of action as a communicative tool. Currently I work mainly on relative clauses (processing and production) in Spanish by different groups of speakers and in contrasting heritage language learners to monolingual learners and second language learners, mainly concerning lexical deployment measures and syntactic elaboration measures.

I have taught Advanced Spanish Syntax, Sociolinguistics, History of Linguistics, Spanish (all levels), Advanced Grammar and Composition in Spanish, Conversational Spanish, Spanish Phonology and Phonetics, Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics, Spanish in the USA, and Spanish for Heritage Speakers, Advanced Grammar and Spanish Variation and Change.

I have worked at University of Almería, University of León, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara City College and Westmont College. Currently I am an Associate Spanish Linguistics Professor at University of Wyoming.

HOBBIES

Dancing: Swing family of dances (Lindy, Collegiate Shag, Balboa), Blues (I sometimes DJ for Blues-y music), some Latin dances (Salsa, Cha-cha-chá, apparently inadvertedly I do Cumbia sometimes, and the dreaded Bachata). Hoping to learn West Coast Swing and Electro-Swing, some day...

Gardening, mostly non-edibles, native plants when possible.

DYI projects

Listening to music and audiobooks while I do whatever non-intellectual task. Some favorites: Röyksopp, Air, Goldfrapp.