I was born near Barcelona, Spain, so I grew up speaking Catalan and Spanish at home. As a kid, I was fascinated by languages, and I was lucky enough to have amazing teachers who inspired me to become a professor and who turned what was initially a personal interest into a life-long academic pursuit. After completing a BA in translation at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and a Master’s in Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, I pursued a Ph.D. in linguistics at Cornell University. I have been at Holy Cross, where I am currently professor of Spanish, for the past 16 years. As a Romance linguist, I consider myself a generalist with a strong interest in both theoretical and applied linguistics. I work primarily with Spanish, but my research has also focused on Italian, Catalan, and (to a lesser extent) French and English. My scholarship in my first years at Holy Cross focused mostly on two areas: theoretical syntax (the study of the abstract principles and mechanisms underlying the structure of sentences), and the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. However, in the last several years my main focus has shifted to certain word combinations known as collocations. More specifically, in my most recent work I study the origins and historical evolution of Spanish collocations from the earliest texts (in the 1200s) to the present day.