Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell is a linguist and currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Her research and teaching interests focus primarily on semantics, pragmatics, syntax-semantics interfaces, Indigenous languages of the Americas, English and Romance linguistics from a comparative perspective, dialectal and typological variation, bilingualism and languages in contact, and sociolinguistics. 

Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell has an MA and PhD in Linguistics from The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), with one-year stays as a visiting PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of São Paulo (USP), and as a Visiting Scholar at Boston University (BU). She graduated with a BA in English Philology from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) and also studied as an undergraduate exchange student at Queen Mary University of London and UT Austin for one academic year each. She has taught a wide array of Linguistics (e.g. introduction to linguistics and Hispanic linguistics, syntax and semantics, sociolinguistics, language, scoiopolitics, and identity: Spanish in the U.S.) and language as a second language and heritage language (English, Spanish, Portuguese) university courses at various institutions in the United States such as at Wellesley College, BU, UT Austin, College of the Holy Cross, and currently in Spain at UIB. 

In her current projects, she explores how we talk about time and space. More in particular, she focuses on how languages express temporal or spatial delimitation as well as the cross-(and intra-)linguistic variation in how words with otherwise similar meanings behave. Methodologically, she uses a combination of traditional theoretical and empirical formal linguistics, cutting across theoretical boundaries, with more quantitative (e.g. corpus) data to account for dialectal and contextual variation.

Maria del Mar Bassa Vanrell has also recently been the recipient of two Wellesley College faculty research awards, which have resulted, so far, in two ongoing projects on Karitiana (an Indigenous language of Brazil) in collaboration with Prof. Karin Vivanco from University of Campinas, Brazil. Generally speaking, these projects examine, on the one hand, (i) the semantics and pragmatics of temporal expressions such as before and after and the behavior of negative particles in Karitiana, and, on the other hand, (ii) semantic and pragmatic variation of traditionally putative factive and non-factive predicates that are nominalized in the language.

In previous research, she has contributed to and collaborated on work on the cross-linguistic encoding of goals of manner of motion events; the phenomenon of Differential Object Marking in Spanish, Standard Catalan, and Majorcan Catalan; the use of the locative preposition dins ‘inside’ in Majorcan Catalan in opposition to its Standard Catalan use, and on indexicality and referentiality of pronominal shifts in a specific dialect of Dominican Spanish.

• Research Projects:

• Tense and aspect and negation in Karitiana (Indigenous language in the Brazilian Amazon), joint project with Dr. Karin Vivanco (University of Campinas, São Paulo).  

Grant number: FF24625, Wellesley College.

• Sociolinguistic variation and spelling in Karitiana (Indigenous language in the Brazilian Amazon), joint project with Dr. Karin Vivanco (University of Campinas, São Paulo).  

Grant number: FF24403, Wellesley College.

Publications (Last 5 years):

• (Under Review) The role of pragmatics and lexical semantics in descriptions of motion events in Spanish. Submitted to Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. 

• Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C. (2023). Temporal interpretations of negation in Karitiana. Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos, 65, e023015-e023015. 

• Vivanco, K., & Bassa Vanrell, M. D. M. (2023). Factive Entailments and Clausal Complementation in Karitiana. Languages, 8(4), 234. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8040234

Conference Presentations (Last 5 years): 

• 11/2023 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C. Cuestionando la dicotomía de verbos factivos y no factivos en Karitiana. Congreso de idiomas indígenas de Latinoamérica – X (CILLA X). University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. 

• 06/2023 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C. Semantic riddles: Logic and meanings of negative -ki in Karitiana. Logic and Grammar and Meaning. The (pipe)line connecting 50 years of semantics. Invited talk at a workshop in honor of Gennaro Chierchia. University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. 

• 05/2023 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C.Sobre verbos factivos em Karitiana. Invited talk in the Linguistics Department at Universisade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.

• 04/2023 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C. Factivity and clausal nominalization in Karitiana. The 26th Workshop of Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas  (WSCLA 26). McGill University, Montreal, Canada. 

• 02/2023 Vanrell, M. D. M. B. On Spanish in the USA in the film In the Heights. Invited talk at the Spanish and Portuguese Film Festival, Wellesley College. 

• 03/2022 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C.  Sociolinguistic variation and spelling in Karitiana. Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) 2022. Georgetown University [online].

• 09/2021 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., Ferreira, L.F. & Vivanco, K. C. The syntax/semantics of noun phrases in a language with no DP. An analysis of Karitiana. 13th Workshop on Formal Linguistics (13th WFL). Universidade de Brasília (UnB), Brazil [online]. 

• 05/2021 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C. Temporal interpretations of negation in Karitiana. Lightning talk, 25th Workshop of Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 25). Sogang University, South Korea [online]. 

• 03/2020 Vanrell, M. D. M. B., & Vivanco, K. C.Sociolinguistic variation and spelling in Karitiana. Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). UT Austin [Accepted; conference cancelled due to Covid-19 & we had to re-apply for the following edition].

• 09/2019 Vanrell, M. D. M. B.When time and space are lost in translation. American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), 12th Biennial Northeast Regional Conference. Wellesley College.

• 03/2017 Linguistics outreach panel organizer: The logic and structure of languages. Talk: Semântica e Pragmática.- Língua, tempo, e espaço. Invited by The Association of Brazilian Researchers and Scholars in Boston (PUB-BOSTON) to organize a linguistics outreach panel and present about what linguists do. Cambridge Innovation Center, MA.