Enrique Pato

Enrique Pato is a Full Professor in the Department of Literatures and World Languages at the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Montreal, and also holds an affiliation with the Center for Medieval Studies. His academic career spans decades of research in Hispanic linguistics with a focus on grammatical variation across Spanish-speaking communities. Professor Pato maintains an active research program while teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish linguistics and language.

Professor Pato's research interests encompass Spanish dialectology, historical linguistics, language variation phenomena, Spanish grammar and syntax, Spanish as a Foreign Language (ELE), and language contact situations. His work examines linguistic structures across diverse Spanish-speaking regions including Montreal's Hispanic community, Central America, and the Caribbean. He has made significant contributions to understanding morphosyntactic variation in Hispanic linguistics through both theoretical frameworks and empirical corpus-based approaches.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals consistent patterns in grammatical variation across Spanish dialects, with particular emphasis on Central American varieties. His research demonstrates systematic patterns in quantifier usage, possessive constructions, adverbial expressions, and morphosyntactic phenomena across different Spanish-speaking communities. This work contributes to broader linguistic understanding of how language evolves through contact, social factors, and historical development.

Scientific Recognition:

• University of Montreal Teaching Excellence Award (2011)

Professor Pato has supervised over 35 Master's and PhD students, guiding research on diverse topics including Spanish dialects in Montreal, Venezuela, Honduras, and various grammatical phenomena. His research is supported by multiple collaborative projects including COLEM (Corpus oral de la lengua española en Montreal), Dialectos del español (with HU-Berlin and Lausanne), and the Atlas Lingüístico de Puerto Rico. He has secured funding from multiple international sources to support his comparative dialectology work.

He leads the COLEM project, which studies Spanish in Montreal through oral corpus collection, and collaborates on international projects examining Spanish dialects across the Hispanic world. His laboratory work focuses on corpus linguistics methodology, with particular attention to documenting endangered linguistic features and analyzing language contact phenomena in multilingual contexts like Montreal.