Isabel Oltra-Massuet

Isabel holds a BA in Anglo-German Philology from the University of Barcelona (UB), a Master of Science in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a PhD in Linguistics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Her work has mostly focused on the study of morphology and its interface with the other major components of grammar.

She has published on theme vowels, stress, variability and syncretism, the lexicon-syntax interface in derived forms, scalarity, modal adjectives and capacities, and syntactic priming in comprehension. Isabel is especially interested in theme vowels, the lexicon-syntax interface in verb-related derivations, unergativity and the theory of Distributed Morphology. In most of her scientific work she has taken a comparative approach, with her main working languages being Catalan, Spanish, English, and German.

Since 2015, she has been delving into neurolinguistics as a continuing visiting scholar of the NeLLAB-NYUAD, in work with Alec Marantz (NYU) and Linnaea Stockall (QMUL). She also participates in the ERC-Synergy funded Project Leibniz’s Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind, led by Artemis Alexiadou (Leibniz-ZAS), Uli Sauerland (Leibniz-ZAS), and Maria Teresa Guasti (UNIMIB), being responsible for the Spanish child language data. Isabel has published in peer-reviewed journals like Linguistic Inquiry, Lingua, Glossa, Frontiers, and in major publishers such as The MIT Press, John Benjamins, Oxford University Press, or Mouton De Gruyter.