Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Patrícia Amaral is a new Assistant Professor of Hispanic linguistics. She received her PhD in 2007 from The Ohio State University and has held positions at Stanford University, the University of Liverpool, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, with a particular focus on language change in the Ibero-Romance languages. She is also interested in language contact. She recently edited Portuguese/Spanish Interfaces: Diachrony, Synchrony and Contact (with Ana Maria Carvalho, John Benjamins, 2014). She has been the recipient of several awards, like a doctoral fellowship from the Fulbright Commission and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and research grants from the German DAAD and from the Spencer Foundation. She is currently working on several papers that address the interaction between syntactic change and discourse structure in the history of Spanish.