My name is Luismi. I am assistant professor at Georgetown Univeristy, in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. 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.