I am associate professor at the Departament of Catalan Philology and member of the Center for Linguistic Theory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where I have developed my academic career since 1997. Before that, I obtained my BA in Catalan Philology at the Universitat de Barcelona, where I also held a four-year predoctoral fellowship.

Currently, I am the coordinator of the BA degree Filologia Catalana: Estudis de literatura i lingüística, and before that I was the coordinator of the MA degree Estudis avançats de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes (UAB-UB).

I am co-editor, with Klaus von Heusinger, of the Brill series Current Research in the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface.

You can contact me at Xavier dot Villalba usual sign uab dot cat 

Xavier Villalba (0000-0001-6993-976X) - ORCID 

My research career focuses on Hispanic languages (Catalan and Spanish), within the field of syntax and its connections to semantics, and pragmatics. My first research achievement was my 2000 PhD thesis (“The syntax of sentence periphery”, revised and published as Villalba 2009), which raised a principled analysis of left and right dislocation according to Kayne’s (2004) Linear Correspondence Axiom, arguing that right-dislocates were placed in a lower Topic Phrase, just above the VP, in contrast with left-dislocates, which were placed in a higher Topic Phrase in the left periphery of sentence. This research on right-dislocation is my most cited work (69 ISI citations) and was pursued from a comparative perspective in different articles (Villalba 2007a, Villalba 2011a, Villalba & Mayol 2013, and Planas-Morales & Villalba 2013) to develop a novel study of microvariation at the level of information structure in Catalan and Spanish, grounded on exhaustive corpus study. These works showed that even though Catalan and Spanish are close Romance languages, the former makes a pervasive use of right-dislocation, whereas the latter resorts to deaccenting. Moreover, we showed that right-dislocation has a wider set of discourse functions than previously assumed in the literature, which was confirmed experimentally from its interaction with bridging phenomena in Brunetti et al. (2020).

            My second set of outstanding research achievements concentrates on exclamative sentences in Romance. Originally, my interest was syntactic in Villalba (2003), the first exhaustive study of Romance that-exclamatives (my second most cited work: 24 ISI citations), which has found a recent continuation in Trotzke & Villalba (2020), where we offer a comparison between Romance and Germaninc that-exclamatives from an experimental pragmatics perspective. More recently, I have been concerned with the pragmatic contribution of exclamatives in Villalba (2024a), that analyses exclamations within the framework of normative pragmatics based on commitments, and in Villalba (2024b), where I discuss the interaction of mirative markers with exclamative sentence-type. My expertise on this area was recognized by the commission of three state-of-the-art chapters in collective volumes (Villalba, 2023, in Wh-exclamatives, Imperatives and Wh-questions, Feldhausen & Villalba 2020, in Manual of Catalan Linguistics, and Villalba 2017b, in Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax, all of them published by De Gruyter), besides my introductory article to the 2008 monographic volume on exclamatives sentences that I edited for Catalan Journal of Linguistics.

            Finally, I am pursuing a new line of research on the functional architecture of sentence and its relation to semantics and modality on the one hand, and discourse and expressive meaning on the other, within the funded research project Expletiviness and Expressive Meaning (PID2023-150347NB-I00). In my 2019 article in Syntax (Villalba 2019a), I argued for crucial role of semantic selection in the articulation of the left periphery of relative and interrogative nonfinite sentences, an issue that I pursued a bit further with Dr. Planas-Morales (Villalba & Planas-Morales, 2020), and in my more recent article (Villalba, 2022), where I discuss the nature of prepositional complementizers and their connection with the modal interpretation of infinitival relative clauses. More recently, I have been working with Leonardo Russo (University of Cambridge) on the possibility of a defective Voice in reduced infinitive clauses. As for the encoding of discourse and expressive meaning at the left periphery of sentence, I have collaborated with Drs. M.T. Espinal and C. Real-Puigdollers in the analysis of Spanish discourse marker vaya, which encodes different expressive meanings by the speaker. In Espinal, Real-Puigdollers, & Villalba (2024), we consider its evolution from a verbal form to an epistemic discourse marker, and in Real-Puigdollers, Espinal, & Villalba (in press), we show a further development whereby it becomes a commitment marker, formally encoding a VERUM operator. Finally, in my recent paper in Journal of Pragmatics (Villalba 2024b), I analyze the semantic and pragmatic roles of exclamative markers and their position in the left periphery of sentence in Romance languages. The relevance of this line of research can be witnessed by the commission of a chapter on deverbal discourse markers for the collective book Sintaxis Histórica del Español. Volume cuarto.