I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA.
I’m a linguist who takes a cross-linguistic approach, focusing on Mayan, (Heritage) Spanish, and Bantu. I’ve recently been thinking about ellipsis licensing, relative clauses, (weak) crossover phenomena, split ergativity, and null complement anaphora. Other topics I’ve worked on include agreement, sibilant harmony, linearization, A’-extraction restrictions, and information structure.
Language revitalization and documentation are also a key part of my work. I have contributed to these areas in Guatemala (Xinka, Kaqchikel, Tz’utujil) and in California (Rumsen).
I received my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. My dissertation is available here.
The wonderful members of my UMD cohort (collectively known as SMAART) were Sigwan Thivierge, Mina Hirzel, Anouk Dieuleveut, Aaron Doliana, _ and Tyler Knowlton.
Upcoming talks:
- “Ellipsis in Heritage Languages“. Colloquium, UC Santa Barbara Department of Linguistics.
Latest papers:
- “Ellipsis in Contact: VPE and Sluicing in Spanish Heritage Speakers” with Erin Mauffray and Victoria Mateu to appear in The Proceedings of the 50th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 50): [link]
- “El cuento de kokolom/chi’jolom: Bosquejo gramatical y comparación dialectal del idioma Chuj” to appear in Tlalocan: [link] to latest version.
- “Weak Crossover in Spanish Relative Clauses” with Greg Scontras and Masha Polinsky in Probus: [link]
- “Wh-questions and predication in Mayan” with Justin Royer and Cristina Buenrostro under review: [link] to latest version.
- Book chapter “VP-ellipsis in Spanish” under review; e-mail me for a draft!
Contact me:
ranero [at] ucla [dot] edu
Rodrigo Ranero 