Bio

Francesc (Xico) Torres-Tamarit has a degree in Catalan Philology (2007) and PhD in Cognitive Science and Language (2012). He specialises in theoretical phonology and constraint-based phonological models. After a Rubicon postdoc fellowship (Netherlands) at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, he taught at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He took up a permanent research position at the CNRS (France) in 2015. In 2022, he joined the Centre for Theoretical Linguistics and Catalan Philology Department at the UAB as a Ramón y Cajal fellow. His research results have been published in specialised journals including Language, a journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Morphology, Linguistics, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistic Inquiry and Phonetica, among others. Some of his most noteworthy work includes studies on metrically conditioned segmental phenomena, metaphony, prosodic morphology and the syntax–phonology interface. He is co-editor of the Squibs & Discussion section of Linguistic Inquiry, a journal published by MIT Press.

Project

During his residency at Faberllull, he will be working on the book A Stratal Phonology of Catalan for use as a handbook for the subject at public universities. This book has an innovative approach, abandoning the now obsolete classical generative phonology, which is based on rules, for the theoretical framework of Stratal Optimality Theory (SOT) to describe and explain Catalan phonology. SOT is a theory based on constraints, incorporating notions of cycles and strata, which give the model a strong explanatory component. According to SOT, phonology is applied cyclically to bigger and bigger domains defined morphosyntactically: the root, the word and the phrase.