Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell

Publications & Talks

Publications


Under review — Variation in the atelicity of ‘until’-like particles: Contrasting Spanish hasta to English until. Submitted to Journal of Semantics. 

Under review — The role of pragmatics and lexical semantics in descriptions of motion events in Spanish. Submitted to Linguistics.  

2023 — with Karin Vivanco. Temporal interpretations of negation in Karitiana. Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos, v.65 2023.

2023 — with Karin Vivanco. Factive entailments and clausal complementation in Karitiana. Languages 2023, 8, 234.

2017 — Scope, scalarity, and polarity in aspectual marking : the case of English ‘until’ and Spanish ‘hasta’. The University of Texas at Austin, PhD Dissertation.

My dissertation argues that it is possible to give a uniform semantic and pragmatic core to seemingly distinct functions of words that describe delimitation, such as the aspectual marker hasta ‘until’ in Spanish. Hasta can mark spatial and temporal boundaries (similar to English to and until, respectively), and serve as a scalar additive particle (similar to English even). I claim that all of these functions of hasta have a strong family resemblance of scalarity in common. Each use describes an event participant that is the furthest along some ordered scale of possible event participants, where the scale may represent ordered locations, times, or other types of event participants ranked along a scale of likelihood of participating in the event. I also examine the effects of until-like particles with focus-based exhaustifying operators and their interactions with polarity and the inferential system in ways that explain syntactic and semantic scopal interactions of until-phrases with other quantificational phrases and certain inferences that until-phrases generate about the starting and stopping points of the events described by the predicate they modify in ways that predict different inferences depending on whether the predicate is affirmative or negative and what its aspectual class is. Finally, I extend this analysis to other atelic modifiers, such as for-adverbials, which have similar properties but differ somewhat in their lexical semantics. I ultimately propose two distinct semantic denotations that are available cross-linguistically for such measure phrases so as to explain a novel typological pattern. I suggest parameterization in the quantificational nature of measure phrases by which the temporal uses of an ‘until’ word in a language can either represent a type of universal quantification over times (as in English) or existential quantification (as in Spanish), which produces different distributions of ‘until’-like phrases with different aspectual classes of predicates and also different inference patterns. The proposed parameterization is able to capture the constrained scopal and semantic behavior of until while allowing for a wider set of interpretations of hasta. My dissertation is distinctive from previous works, which only centered on a subset of the functions that such aspectual markers may acquire as other peculiar behavior went unnoticed. Instead, I unify semantic and pragmatic notions of scales and integrate them with syntactic constraints to find larger connected cross-linguistic generalizations while also considering how a range of different kinds of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors can conspire to produce different patterns. 

2016 — with Juan Romeu. A Minimal Cartography of Differential Object Marking in Spanish. Iberia: An International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics. Volume 6 (2014), 75–104.

2013 — Preposition typology with manner of motion verbs in Spanish. The University of Texas at Austin, MA Thesis.

2013 — Personal uno in Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers 2013: 1-20.

Talks

I. Invited Talks

  1. 05/2025 — with Karin Vivanco. Structure and semantics of embedded clauses in Karitiana. GRESIB (Sociolinguistics Research Group of the Balearic Islands) virtual seminar, Spain. 
  2. 06/2023 — with Karin Vivanco. Semantic riddles: Logic and meanings of negative -ki in Karitiana. Logic and Grammar and Meaning. The (pipe) line connecting 50 years of semantics. Workshop in honor of Gennaro Chierchia. University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy.
  3. 05/2023 — with Karin Vivanco. Sobre verbos factivos em Karitiana. Linguistics Department, Universisade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.
  4. 02/2023 — On Spanish in the USA in the film In the Heights. Spanish and Portuguese Film Festival, Wellesley College.
  5. 12/2017 — Scalar and inferential reasoning about time and space. Linguistics program, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain.
  6. 03/2017 — Linguistics panel organizer: The logic and structure of languages. Talk: Semântica e Pragmática.- Língua, tempo, e espaço. The Association of Brazilian Researchers and Scholars in Boston (PUB-BOSTON). Cambridge Innovation Center, MA.
  7. 02/2017 — On the plurality ofatelicity. The Meaning & Modality Laboratory (M&M Lab). Department of Linguistics, Harvard University.
  8. 08/2016 — On the logic of universal quantification over time intervals. Department of Linguistics, the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil.
  9. 04/2015 — One or two UNTILs? The case of single-UNTIL languages. Ling Lunch Meeting. Department of Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).   
  10. 11/2012 — On the nature of P(a, hacia, hasta) with manner of motion verbs in Spanish. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language (MAL). Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Texas at Austin (UT).
  11. 02/2012 — Are you talking only about yourself? On the referentiality of uno in Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language (MAL). Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Texas at Austin (UT).
  12. 02/2011 — Differential Object Marking tendency by Balearic Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (Catalan dominants). The role of referentiality, semantic type, and language background. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language (MAL). Department of Spanish and Portuguese, The University of Texas at Austin (UT).

II. Peer-reviewed Conference Presentations

  1. 10/2024 — with Karin Vivanco. The impact of nominal clausal complements on factivity in Karitiana. 13 Semantics of Underrepresented Languages of the Americas (SULA 13). Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. 
  2. 09/2024 — Until-XPs and their ‘probability’ inference. Poster, Sinn und Bedeutung 29 (SuB 29). Noto, Italy. 
  3. 11/2023 — with Karin Vivanco. Cuestionando la dicotomía de verbos factivos y no factivos en Karitiana. Congreso de idiomas indígenas de Latinoamérica – X (CILLA X). University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
  4. 04/2023 — with Karin Vivanco. Factivity and clausal nominalization in Karitiana. The 26thWorkshop of Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 26). McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
  5. 03/2022 — with Karin Vivanco. Sociolinguistic variation and spelling in Karitiana. Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) 2022. Georgetown University [online].
  6. 09/2021 — with Luiz Fernando Ferreira and Karin Vivanco. The syntax/semantics of noun phrases in a language with no DP. An analysis of Karitiana. 13th Workshop on Formal Linguistics (13th WFL). Universidade de Brasília (UnB), Brazil [online].
  7. 05/2021 — with Karin Vivanco. Temporal interpretations of negation in Karitiana. Lightning talk, 25th Workshop of Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 25). Sogang University, South Korea [online].
  8. 03/2020 — with Karin Vivanco. Sociolinguistic variation and spelling in Karitiana. Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). UT Austin [Accepted; conference cancelled due to Covid-19 & we had to re-apply for the following edition].
  9. 09/2019 — When time and space are lost in translation. American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), 12th Biennial Northeast Regional Conference. Wellesley College.
  10. 09/2017 — Variation in the logic of durativity of ‘until’-like particles: A contrastive analysis of English and Spanish. Poster, Sinn und Bedeutung 22 (SuB 22). Berlin, Germany.
  11. 01/2017 — A plural implicature-based approach of the Spanish durative adverbial hasta ‘until.’ The 91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA 2017). Austin, TX.
  12. 09/2015 — The puzzle of Punctual Until revisited. Poster, Sinn und Bedeutung 20 (SuB 20). Tübingen, Germany.
  13. 10/2014 — Hasta as a goal marker parallels hasta as a scalar additive particle in Spanish. The 15th Texas and Linguistics Society Conference (TLS 15). Austin, TX.
  14. 08/2014 — Towards an account of Spanish hasta as a scalar additive particle and as a goal marker. X Workshop on Formal Linguistics (10th WFL). Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sûl (UFRGS), Brazil.
  15. 06/2013 — with Juan Romeu. Microvariation of dins in Catalan. International Workshop “The Syntactic Variation of Catalan and Spanish Dialects.” Centre de Lingüística Teòrica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
  16. 05/2013 — with Juan Romeu. The Meaning of DOM in Spanish. CASTL Spring Conference on Differential Object Marking. University of Tromsø, Norway.
  17. 11/2012 — On the Nature of P (a, hacia, hasta) with Manner of Motion Verbs in Spanish. The Meaning of P Conference. Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.
  18. 04/2012 — Personal uno in Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish. Illinois Language and Linguistics Society 4. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, IL.
  19. 03/2012 — Are you Talking only about Yourself? On Referentiality of the Pronoun uno in Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish. 20th Colloquium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Linguistics: Migrating through Alternative Spaces in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies. The University of Texas at Austin, TX.