Department of Spanish and Portuguese

My research focuses on how lexical, contextual, and pragmatic factors affect interpretation in systematic ways. I have a longstanding interest in studying different types of meaning (e.g., presuppositions, conventional implicatures, conversational implicatures) and providing tests to identify them. I am also interested in how inferential mechanisms in interpretation play a role in semantic change and have recently been involved in several projects that study syntactic and semantic change in Ibero-Romance (particularly Portuguese and Spanish). In addition, I have worked on language contact; I have done some research on the morpho-syntax and semantics of Barranquenho, a variety spoken in the southeast of Portugal, close to the border. In my work I adopt a variety of methodologies, ranging from analyzing corpus data to experimental methods.