María Cristina Cuervo

María Cristina Cuervo is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Spanish, appointed at the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and at the Department of Linguistics. Her research has appeared in Syntax, Probus, Lingua, Theoretical Linguistics, Borealis, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and in volumes by Benjamins, Bloomsbury, Iberoamericana, a.o. She published an edited volume (The End of Argument Structure?, Emerald, with Yves Roberge) in 2012. Her work has been funded by various Victoria College and U of T grants, and a Jackman Research Fellowship. In 2013 Prof. Cuervo received an Outstanding Teaching Award from Arts & Science at U of T.

Her research considers how specific grammatical phenomena in several languages (argument / event structure, dative arguments, morphological form) inform the broader question of how structural properties of language restrict and shape the construction of linguistic meaning. Her work has focused on the relative contribution of lexical verbal roots, prepositions and grammatical morphemes to the construction of verbal meanings. More recently, she has also been working in collaboration with students on the tense system in Spanish and how it is acquired. She draws on natural language data from a variety of sources (speakers’ intuitions, corpora and experimental data) and speaker populations (children, adult native speakers, and second language learners). Her research is couched within a linguistic theory that studies language as a human-specific cognitive faculty.