Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Education
Ph.D., Georgetown University
B.A., University of California, Berkeley
Research Statement
Grant Armstrong’s general research interests focus on the morphology, syntax, and semantics of Spanish. Specific topics that he works on within those areas include the Grammar of Lexical Semantic Verb Classes (Activity, Change of State), Transitivity, Applicatives, the Uses of the Pronominal Clitic ‘se’, the Structure and Interpretation of Past Participles, Degree Terms, and different kinds of Secondary Predication (mainly Resultatives). He also works on Yucatec Maya, a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán peninsula. His research interests within Mayan linguistics include Split Ergativity, Grammatical Function Changing Morphology, the Morphology of Root Classes, Non-Verbal Predicates and Comparative Approaches to Spanish and Mayan Verb Semantics and Morphology.
Teaching
Span 320: Spanish Phonetics
Span 321: Structure of Modern Spanish
Span 327: Introduction to Spanish Linguistics
Span 446: Topics in Spanish Linguistics
Span 630: Topics in Hispanic Linguistics – Morphosyntax
Span 815: Seminar – What’s the word? Topics in Morphological Description and Theory (Spring 2019)
Selected Publications
Lexis. In K. Geeslin (ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, 415-436. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018
SE-marked directed motion constructions: anticausatives and figure reflexives. In J. MacDonald (ed.) Contemporary trends in Hispanic & Lusophone Linguistics, 11-30. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2017
The syntax of non-verbal predication in Yucatec Maya. Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México 4(2): 137-212, 2017
Spanish participios activos are adjectival antipassives. The Linguistic Review 34(1): 1-37, 2017
Una “buena” manera de hablar acerca de grados: bien con adjetivos en español. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 9(2): 401-427 (with Alberto Pastor), 2016
Spanish unspecified objects as null incorporated nouns. Probus 28(2): 165-230, 2016
Pronominal verbs in Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 9(1): 29-65, 2016