My name is Luismi and I am about to start an appointmet as assistant professor at Georgetown Univeristy, in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. Before Georgetown, I have been an assistant professor of Spanish Linguistics at the California State University Fullerton in the department of Modern Languages and Literatures. My primary area of research is theoretical syntax, and its interface with semantics and morphology. I earned my PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California in 2024.
I approach the study of language from the perspective of cognitive science. While there are invariant properties that all languages share, there is also language-specific variation. My goal is to discover what some of the universal principles are and the extent to which such variation is possible. Topics I have worked on include (i) the morpho-syntactic expression and semantic interpretation of countability and number and (ii) the syntax of movement. While the particular questions and conclusions vary with each of the phenomena, at a fundamental level they all reveal that options for variation in grammar are tightly constrained: structures and their meanings are subject to language-universal principles; grammatical uniformity obtains across domains; and syntax affects the semantic component, which in turn may rule out structures that are not interpretable.
I have a strong commitment to studying underrepresented languages by conducting in-situ and ex-situ fieldwork. I have done fieldwork on Rural Iberian Spanishes, Alasha Mongolian, and Ch’ol (in collaboration with Carol-Rose Little). Although I mostly do theoretical work, I have been involved in some experimental work as well.