Research interests: syntax and semantics, generative grammar, sociolinguistics, Romance linguistics.

About

In September 2024, I began my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Michelle Sheehan, Dr. Daniel Duncan, Dr. Gabriel Martínez Vera (Newcastle University), and Prof. Rob Truswell (University of Edinburgh). I invesigate syntactic complementation patterns under the Spanish causative verb hacer "make" which, unlike most Romance varieties, can embed infinitival clausal complements both with pre-verbal and post-verbal embedded subjects (causees). Adopting a quantitative approach, I use empirical findings to analyse both the syntactic structure of the understudied pre-infinitival causee causative constructions, but also to investigate diatopic variation across different varieties of Spanish.

My PhD is part of a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant How autonomous is syntax? A case study of Romance causation and perception (CauRPe). I work closely with a research team made up of Prof. Michelle Sheehan (PI), Prof. Rob Truswell, Prof. Adam Ledgeway, Dr. Sonia Cyrino, Dr. Giulia Mazzola and Dr. Clémentine Raffy. 

The CauRPe project investigates the relationship between language and meaning (syntax-semantics interface) through a corpus and acceptability judgement task study on causative and perception verbs across nine varities of Romance (French, Peninsular and Latin American Spanish, Italian, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian and Southern Italian dialects). 

Outside my work on causation, I have also been a Research Assistant on a project on argument structure in Portuguese, focusing on heritage speakers in the UK (with Prof. Michelle Sheehan and Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou). Additionally, I worked with Dr. Daniel Duncan on a sociolinguistic study of pronominal variation in Tyneside English.