My research brings grammatical patterns from lesser-studied languages to bear on key questions of linguistic theory. Many of my projects investigate the role of word-internal syntactic structure in the phonology and morphology of agglutinating languages. I focus mainly on A'ingae (or Cofán, ISO 639-3: con), an Amazonian isolate spoken by ca. 1,500 Cofán people in Ecuador and Colombia.
Tomás is a semanticist and fieldworker interested in cross-linguistic variation. Before starting at Berkeley, he did a BA/MA at Yale, advised by Claire Bowern and Zoltán Szabó. He is interested in gradability, comparison, and context-sensitivity. His research draws on insights from Indigenous Australian languages, especially Pitjantjatjara, a language spoken in Central Australia.
