Coordinator
Antonio Fábregas
I am full professor of Spanish linguistics at UiT-Arctic University of Norway, and the coordinator of NEON. My areas of research are the analysis of the internal syntactic structure of so-called morphological objects, and their connections with semantics and phonology. I have worked, and currently still work, in category change, prefixation, compounding, aspect and the rest of the functional structure of clauses, and the syntax of nominal elements.
Other members
Víctor Acedo-Matellán
My overarching interest is the connection between syntactic configuration and morphophononological and “lexical” semantic effects, from a basic Hale&Keyser + Distributed Morphology perspective. Some of my current research includes the nanosyntactic decomposition of directional PPs and preverbs in Latin, and the syntactic factors in the licensing of agentivity in verbs (alternations with perception verbs and prepositions/particles in Germanic). With Cristina Real Puigdollers (UPF, Barcelone), I am looking at locality in the assignment of special meaning (gender in Romance), semi-lexicality in nominal classifiers, and the connection between Talmy’s typology and creation predicates.
María J. Arche
María J. Arche does research on the syntax-semantics interface focusing on Tense, Aspect, Argument Structure and copular verbs. She has studied these topics in the grammar of Spanish and has also investigated their crosslinguistic variation and acquisition. The predictions of her theoretical work on aspect and copular verbs have been applied to the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Arche has published papers and edited special issues in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Lingua, Second Language Research, Bilingualism: Language & Cognition, as well as a monograph at John Benjamins and edited volumes at Bloomsbury and Oxford University Press.
Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero
Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero studies the interactions and division of labour between phonetics, phonology, morphology, and the lexicon in determining the form of linguistic expressions. His research addresses issues related to discreteness and gradience, redundancy, and modularity in grammar, and pays special attention to evidence from language variation and change. He works mainly with data from English and the Romance languages.
Ángeles Carrasco
My current research topics are three. First, I try to understand why some grammatical constructions have influence on the stative behaviour of dynamic predicates: perfect morphology, the progressive periphrasis <estar + gerundio>, or root modals. Second, I am working on the interaction between Tense / Aspect and Modality in two types of structures: pairs of examples such as debe de haber llovido and debió de llover; and sequences such as pudo abrir la puerta. Finally, I am interested in the syntax of non epistemic perception, in particular, and the properties and definition of restructuring configurations in Spanish, in general.
Isabel Crespí
I am a predoctoral researcher at the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica (CLT) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). In my thesis I study the internal structure and the combinatorial properties of non-personal verbal forms, especially of the participles. More specifically, I study their syntactic behaviour in different Romance languages, taking Catalan as the baseline. This has led me to make incursions into the world of verbal periphrases, copulative, quasicopulative and auxiliary verbs, case assignment, prepositions and relational structures, Aspect and Aktionsart, among others.
Ricardo Etxepare
Ricardo Etxepare is Directeur de Recherche at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), and he works at the lab IKER (Bayonne), specialized in the Basque language. His latest work involves contributions in the following areas : (i) poverty of stimulus issues in language contact situations ; (ii) processes of diachronic change in the Basque language and historical corpus annotation; (iii) syntactic microvariation as a tool for uncovering design properties of grammar ; (iv) information structure and the way it relates to syntactic structure.
Elisabeth Gibert-Sotelo
In my research I explore the relation between lexical items, structure, and meaning from a neo-constructionist perspective. I am mainly interested in the linguistic encoding of motion events, the inner aspect of verbal and non-verbal predicates, the precise way in which structural meaning and conceptual content interact, and the linguistic cycle in morphosyntactic diachronic variation. Currently, I work as an associate lecturer at the Universitat de Girona (Department of Philology and Communication) and at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Department of Spanish Philology), and I am a collaborating member of the research group on Diachronic Linguistics and Comparative Grammar of the Universitat de Girona.
Raquel González Rodríguez
I am an Assistant Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. My main research interests include Spanish grammar (syntax and semantics) and theoretical linguistics. I am particularly interested in the syntax-semantics interface, mostly in the domain of verbal argument structure, tense, aspect, modality and verbal periphrases. I am currently working on the interaction of negation and verbal semantics.
Matías Jaque
My research interest focuses on the syntactic codification of event structure in the verbal phrase, as well as the interrelation between verbal functional categories (Tense, Aspect, Modality). I have working on grammatically relevant stativity types (pure states, Davidsonian-states, causative states, among others) and on how this aspectual category interacts with higher functional projections in clause structure, such as Epistemic Modality. Recently, I participate in a Chilean research project dedicated to the study of multiverbal constructions of the va y le grita (‘he goes and shout to him’) kind, taking into account their semantic and syntactic properties, as well as his dialectal distribution.
Rafael Marín
I am researcher of linguistics at the laboratory STL (UMR 8163), CNRS & Université de Lille. My work focuses on lexical aspect and related phenomena, and I have mainly worked on non-verbal predication (adjectives and participles, copular constructions), psychological predicates, and derivational morphology (nominalizations, deverbal adjectives). I have been the editor of several volumes and I have published articles in journals such as Natural Language and Linguistics Theory, Journal of Linguistics, The Linguistic Review, Lingua, Linguistics or Word Structure. Since 2016, I am the Director of the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation.
Jaume Mateu
My main area of research are the relations between syntax and the lexicon (i.e., argument structure) in Romance and Germanic languages, as well as in Latin. Specifically, I am currently researching two topics: (i) the structure of parasynthetic verbs in Latin and its evolution in Romance languages and (ii) the structure of different types of Latin participles. I am PR and coordinator of projects FFI2014-56968-C4 La variación en las interfaces de la sintaxis con otros componentes del sistema lingüístico (2015-2018) and FFI2017-87140-C4-1-P Redes de variación microparamétricas en las lenguas románicas (2018-2021).
José-Luis Mendívil
José-Luis Mendívil-Giró is Full Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). His research and publications have focussed on three main branches of theoretical linguistics: (i) the scientific basis of Generative Grammar and Biolinguistics, (ii) the nature and extent of language change and language diversity, and (iii) the cognitive status of words and morphemes.
Isabel Oltra-Massuet
My work has mostly focused on the study of morphology and its interface with the other major components of the language faculty within the Distributed Morphology framework. I am especially interested in argument structure, event structure, derivational morphology, deverbal adjectives, verbal inflection, and Distributed Morphology. Since my first research stay at the NeLLab – NYU Abu Dhabi in 2015, I have been delving into neurolinguistics and have started to work on the neural bases of argument structure. In most of my scientific work I have taken a comparative approach, with my main working languages being Catalan, Spanish, English, and German.
Anna Pineda
My research interests include syntactic microvariation in Romance and Basque, argument structure, unergativity / unaccusativity, case alternations and differential object marking, among others. In my research, I am very much interested in the neoconstructionist approach to argument structure. I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Catalonia (2018-present), with a postdoctoral fellowship Juan de la Cierva-incorporación, provided by the Spanish Government. Just before that, I worked at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Bayonne (where I was a member of a research team in Basque studies), with a postdoctoral fellowship Beatriu de Pinós provided by the Generalitat of Catalonia (2016-2017). I also spent two months as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, England (2017).
Isabel Pujol Payet
Isabel Pujol Payet has been a tenured lecturer in Spanish language (diachrony) at the University of Girona (Spain) since 2002. Her research focuses on historical morphology, particularly on complex verbs and prefixation. She explores different aspects of verbal derivatives, such as their interaction with semantics, argument structure and lexical aspect. She is also interested in the evolution of psychological verbs and in the history of prefixation processes. She is currently the principal investigator, together with Francesc Roca Urgell, of the project Microparameters and linguistic change in Syntax, Morphology and Discourse (FFI2017-87140-C4-2-P), funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.
Cristina Real-Puigdollers
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Translation and Sciences of Language at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. My research field is theoretical syntax, specifically, in two theoretical areas: one that deals with the relationship between syntax and, what has been traditionally known as, the lexicon, and one that seeks to provide a model for cross-linguistic variation based on the so-called Borer-(Chomsky) conjecture, as coined in Baker (2008). In particular, my research has been on the following empirical and theoretical domains: (1) adpositions, (2) the eventive and argument structure of verbs that take a cognate object and an object of creation/consumption, (3) the argument structure of verbs expressing measurement, and (4) the status of roots (or vocabulary items associated with conceptual semantics) within the model. Empirically, I have mainly focused in the sudy of phenomena in Romance Languages, specifically in Catalan, Spanish, and Italian.
Pablo Rico
I’m a PhD student at the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica (CLT) of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). I graduated in Spanish Philology and studied a master in Cognitive Science and Language. Currently I’m working on my thesis, which aims to study the sentential periphery of the infinitival constructions in Spanish and other Romance languages. Some of my areas of interest are the syntax of non-finite forms, the interactions of such forms with conjunctions and prepositions, information structure and the semantics of quantification.
Margot Vivanco
Margot Vivanco works on the semantic-syntax interface adopting a neo-constructionist view of grammar. Her studies concentrate on synchronic syntax of Spanish, even though she is also interested on historical grammar, as well as typological and comparative concerns. Her PhD thesis, Causatividad y cambio de estado en español. La alternancia causativo-inacusativa, was written as an FPU-research fellow at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and she currently works as lecturer at the Universidad de Castilla la Mancha
