Research Projects
Project 1: Forms of Address in Uruguayan Spanish. I have completed data collection for a book-length monograph that explores the regional, social, and pragmatic variation of pronominal and verbal address in the Spanish of Uruguay in the twenty-first century. It considers all three forms of address (vos, tú, and usted) to ascertain the main regional, social, and situational parameters that determine their use. I used a national-scale survey, interviews, and matched-guise experiments, and supplemented them with representations of address in the linguistic land- and mediascape. I am analyzing the surveys quantitatively with Rbrul, and the interviews qualitatively with Atlas.ti. The project has already led to several article publications (e.g., on vocative bo, on women's covert attitudes towards voseo and tuteo, on address variation in popular music and children's literature). The objective is to complete the book manuscript by the end of 2023.
Project 2: Mexican American Voices: A history of Spanish-English Code Mixing in the U.S. Southwest. This project focuses on Spanish-English mixing by Latino artists of the Southwest (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California), such as the Texas Tornados, Lalo Guerrero, and many others. The project documents the public history of bilingual music in the United States. It has required traveling to archives, listening to and transcribing songs, and analyzing them quantitatively for different types of language mixing, and qualitatively for theme, tone, and purpose. The project made very good progress in 2019 thanks to a Glasscock Research Fellowship. The publications from the project have been the result of my collaboration with my colleague Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez (U of Manitoba), with the assistance of several graduate and undergraduate students. Articles from this project have appeared in Language and Communication and Latino Studies.
Project 3. Out of the Mouths of Babes: Child acquisition as a factor in language change. This project focuses on several changes that Latin American Spanish has undergone in the course of its history, including the evolution of its sound system and second person pronominal and verbal address paradigms. Although the features of these changes are well-known, our approach is novel in that it ties those changes, on the one hand, with the situation of extreme dialectal and linguistic mixing wrought by European settlement and immigration, and on the other, with the universal tendencies of child acquisition, as evinced by data from modern L1 acquisition research. This is a collaboration with my colleague (and former student) Israel Sanz-Sánchez, and it has led to several conference talks and to two publications in the Journal of Historical Linguistics and the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics.
Interested in finding out more about any of these projects? Have your own project you would like to tell me about? I am always interested in collaborating with graduate and undergraduate students, so if you would like research credits (SPAN 491, HISP 685, 691), I would love to hear from you. If you are thinking about applying to graduate school in our department, contact me via email.
