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Present
I am currently involved in CASTL-FISH, where I am working in the hierarchical structure of lexical categories, the internal syntax of "words" (for lack of a better name), and the interface between phonology and syntax. (By the way, that fish in the picture is the osteoglossum bicirrhosum or silver arowana, which has a tendency to jump into trees). I am also a member of the Polar Lab, directed by Jason Rothman, where I started collaborating in different projects in psycholinguistics.
Since 2020, I have concentrated on the syntax and semantics of functional structures, with particular attention to the mapping between regions in the syntactic space and the contribution that these make from a variationist perspective. My current interests lie in the following topics, which I am developing in different articles, chapters and monographs:
the nature of verbalisations and how different verb types map within a restricted syntactic space
the nature of SE and the contribution that it makes
gender, number and the rest of the functional projections in the nominal domain
affixes that do not change the grammatical category of the element with which they combine
I am also writing three monographs, one about verbalisations, one about prefixation and one about diagnostic tests in morphosyntax.
Past
I started working in linguistics as a lexicalist morphologist (2000-2003). I am still part of Retem, the Spanish Network of Morphologists, and I get on well with most of its members. Lexicalism didn't last long for me and after coming into contact with Distributed Morphology and other constructionist theories, specially Nanosyntax, I became convinced that syntactic operations are able to account for every aspect of the formation of words, including the alleged distinction between inflection and derivation. I strongly believe that syntax, semantics, phonology and pragmatics are enough to account for all aspects of grammar and morphology is simply a convenient term that we use to refer to the study of these components at a word and sub-word level (and, by the way, word here is also a convenient term for something that most probably does not have a structural reality).
Until 2005 my research concentrated on the definition of the grammatical category, with special reference to nouns and adjectives. This included conversion, transposition -relational adjectives in particular- and several apparent morphological domain effects, including irregularities. During 2006 I explored several ramification of the contructionist hypothesis, including the nature of theme vowels.
Since 2006 and until 2009 I collaborated with the Spanish Royal Academy in the Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española project, directed by Ignacio Bosque.
In 2007 I moved to Tromso as a post-doc funded by the Spanish Education Ministry. Here I came into contact with CASTL, and dived into Nanosyntax in full speed. I explored the relation between lexicalisation and syntactic structure and argued in favour of the Exhaustive Lexicalisation Principle, that proposes that (part of) the variation found in natural languages is explainable through minimal differences in the lexical inventory available in each language -e.g., the availability of directionals with manner of motion verbs-. I have been an affiliate to CASTL since 2007 until now. With the exception of one semester which I spent working with the MorBo group in Bologna in 2008, since 2007 I have always been directly associated to Tromso, its Institute of Language and Linguistics, and CASTL.
Between 2007 and 2011 one of my main lines of research has been nominalisations. I have been the leader in Norway of an international project involving researchers in Germany (University of Stuttgart, Artemis Alexiadou-leader) and France (University of Paris 8 and University of Lille 3, Elena Soare-leader). During this time I have published, authored and co-authored a number of papers on how to analyse nominalisations in a constructionist framework.
I have also been working recently on possessives, case marking, phases, variation, the sociolinguistics of Spanish, and the morphophonological mapping of affixes, among some other things.
During 2012 my research concentrated on two areas of syntax, semantics and phonology. On the one side, adjectivalisations and other forms that take as their core an adjective. This area of categorial syntax has been relatively ignored, in comparison with the nominalisations and the verbalisations. Here I paid attention to three interrelated problemas: (a) participles and their interaction with aspect and gradability, with Rafael Marín in an ongoing collaboration that spans during five years now; (b) the restrictions on affix combinations and what they tell us about the levels at which things act like adjectives and other things act as nouns; (c) the kind of information that the syntax associates to the exponents that have been traditionally classified as 'adjectives': their argument structure, aspect and inflectional properties. Actually, the main issue in this line of research, and the way in which it connects to my previous work on nominalisations, is the question of whether there are primitives, independent of categorial information, that get instantiated in slightly different ways in different syntactic environments, something that is surprising in a cartographic theory.
The second line of research during 2012 was the exploration of the verbal phrase area, and more in particular the question of how much syntactic material can be hosted here without resorting to adjunction.
During the period 2013-2015 I worked in a fine-grained analysis of the internal syntax of adjectival derivation and the syntactic analysis of affix rivalry, affix ordering, truncation and other apparently morphological phenomena involved in category-changing morphology. Other questions that worry me at this point, and which I am trying to understand, are:
- the syntactic analysis of theme vowels in Spanish, from a nanosyntactic perspective
- the relation between phonological constituents and the internal syntactic structure(s) of parasynthetic verbs
- differential object marking, and what it tells us about the internal structure of case projections
- the syntax of conditional structures and modal anchoring
Between 2016-2019 I expanded my research interests to include psycholinguistics, language acquisition and further questions about variation, including the comparison between Catalan varieties, Spanish varieties and the nature of the mapping between syntactic structures and phonology, with particular attention to clitic structures, prefixes and adjuncts. On the word-formation side, the interest drifted towards adjectivalisations, copulative structures, passives and the nature of adjectives as a lexical category, producing two monographs on the topic and an edited volume on copulative structures.