Welcome to my homepage.
I’m a linguist. I currently work at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in the Department of Hispanic Studies. I have just graduated from UMass Amherst, where I enjoyed being part of its legendary Department of Linguistics, a most wonderful place to learn about formal linguistics.
What do I do? Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists like me want to know what kind of implicit knowledge of language we humans have in our heads.
Something that we know when we know a language — any language — is how to use meaningful linguistic units (like words or sentences) to form larger meaningful units (phrases, or more complex sentences) — or how to determine the meaning of a linguistic expression on the basis of its meaningful parts, if you want.
This knowledge makes it very easy for us to convey and understand new complex meanings. Understanding novel meanings is such an easy task that we don’t even pay attention to it. Chances are that you have not encountered the previous sentence before. Yet, if you are fluent in English, you should have had no problem understanding what it means. How come?
I am intrigued by the type of linguistic knowledge that allows speakers of human languages to understand new sentences with such easiness. Linguists like me, who want to know what is behind the mechanics of composing linguistic meanings, call ourselves semanticists. We semanticists struggle to develop formal tools to model meaning composition. For that reason, we sometimes call ourselves formal semanticists.
Certain words are specialized in combining simpler meaningful units to produce more complex ones. Take the following two sentences:
- It is raining.
- My sailing lesson is cancelled.
The word if, for instance, can combine the meaning of the sentences in (1) and (2) to yield a new sentence, with a meaning different from the meaning of (1) and (2):
- If it is raining, my sailing lesson is cancelled.
Words like if provide a unique window into the process of meaning composition, which is to say that they provide a unique window into our minds. That’s why we formal semanticists like them so much. In fact, I spent the last couple of years writing a dissertation about a similar word: or. You might be surprised to learn that giving a formal theory of the semantics of or in human languages proves to be a very difficult task. In my dissertation, I argue that disjunctions like English or feed the semantic composition mechanism with sets of propositional alternatives.
I enjoy teaching as much as I enjoy doing research. In fact, I don’t really see much of a difference between these two aspects of my job. I have been fortunate to have had wonderful teachers in Amherst. Throughout the years, I discovered that what made them so wonderful was that they had developed a personal understanding of the material they were presenting. I secretly aspire to be a bit like them. I hope I will live up to their standards, and manage to convey the excitement of our intellectual enterprise. Formal linguistics is a very young field. There is still a great deal of work that we formal linguists have to do to make other people share our passion about the fascinating properties of human languages.
When I am not doing linguistics, most of the time I practice the venerable art of close-up magic. I might also be cooking, doing Zen meditation, sailing, or eating croissants as if there were no tomorrow.