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Some research topics I'm interested in are: 

  • prepositions

  • existential sentences

  • possession

  • quantification

  • (un)boundedness. 

 

I generally work on Spanish and English, but my research interests are not confined to these languages (nor to the topics listed above!). Any syntactic puzzle is potentially interesting to me!

I wrote my dissertation on a phenomenon I labeled the "completive todo construction" in Spanish, which is exemplified by sentences like Juan tiene toda arena en el pelo ‘Juan has all.F.SG sand.F.SG in his hair’ (Interpretation: Juan's hair is completely covered with sand). I argue that a study of this phenomenon leads us to rethink the syntax of existentials in Spanish and cross linguistically.

I am also looking at a similar and previously unstudied construction in English, There’s all water on the bathroom floor, which is available in some dialects (e.g., some varieties of American English, British English, Irish English) but not others (e.g., mainstream American English). My work on this construction led me to join the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (https://ygdp.yale.edu/research-team), led by Raffaella Zanuttini, Larry Horn, and Jim Wood, where I have been a visiting member since Fall 2021. 

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