LRC VISITOR: LUIS VICENTE

Luis Vicente will join the Department as a Research Associate of the Linguistics Research Center (LRC) for two years beginning in January 2008. A syntactician with a major focus on the structure of Spanish, Basque, and Hungarian, Luis earned his doctorate at Leiden University (The Netherlands) in 2007, working with Lisa Cheng, Anikó Lipták, and Idan Landau. His dissertation, The Syntax of Heads and Phrases, is a study of the predicate cleft construction, focusing especially on data from Spanish and Hungarian. Luis argues for a theory of movement that makes no fundamental distinction between phrases and heads; both move uniformly to specifier and adjoined positions.

Luis also has a well-developed interest in ellipsis phenomena–sluicing, negative fragments, and the like. This will be the focus of his UCSC research program, which is funded by a grant from the governnent of the Basque Country.

We look forward to welcoming Luis to the linguistics community in Santa Cruz.