LASSO - THE LINGUISTIC ASSOCIATION

OF THE SOUTHWEST

49th Annual Meeting

Virtual Meeting – Central Time

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS
Abdelhady Saleem, Memorial University of Newfoundland
 
The Syntax of Expressivity in Arabic: Deprecation and Aggrandizement

Introduction: This study examines the syntax of expressivity in Arabic. Expressive

language refers to the way the speaker is transmitting his/her attitude about a given proposition
(1). Most studies have examined expressive language either from a semantic or pragmatic
perspective s (Frege, 1979; Potts, 2007; Gutzman, 2010; among others). The development in
speech act projections (Haegeman & Hill, 2013; Hill, 2013; Miyagawa, 2017; Wiltschko, 2017)
has enabled a neat integration between expressive language and speech-act participants
(Gutzmann, 2019). Problem: The syntax of expressivity has received a paucity of attention in
the literature. According to Gutzmann (2019), expressive language is limited to adjectives,
intensifiers, vocatives, pronouns, modal particles, and interjections.
Proposal: In this study, we present evidence that expressivity can be hosted onto verbs (2
&4). While Guztman (2019) has presented expressivity without any indication of how it would
impact expressive lexical items, we present evidence, from Arabic, that once expressivity feature
is valued on verbs, it can have two outcomes: aggrandizement and despisement. Aggrandizement
shows up in verbs undergoing pluralization; plurale tantum verbs depart from the typical
association of such a feature with nouns (Pesetsky & Torrego, 2007). Despisement appears
evidently in diminutive verbs (2). Even though diminutive is related to nominals (Wiltschko,
2005), in Arabic, speakers can despise actions (cf., (2) with (3)) by utilizing the same
mechanism.
1. a. sāmī ha-l-maʒdūb nise l-mawʕad.
Sami 3-the-idiot.sm forgot.3sm the-appointment
‘Sami, this idiot, forgot the appointment.’
2. a. mā ʔumajliħa-hu!
par behave.good.DIM-3m.sg
‘How good he is!’
b. mā ʔuħajsina-hu!
par behave.ɡood.DIM-3m.sg
‘How good he is!’
3. ʔalha-ka haða ʔal-ʕuwajlim.
distract-you this
def-scientist.DIM ‘This trivial scientist
distracted you.”
4. hayhaata ʔan-nʤāh-u bi-la
ʕamal. is.impossible.PL.1sg DEF-success-NOM
with-out work ‘Success is so impossible without work.’

The syntactic motivation for expressive verbs is evident in that expressive verbs can only
be hosted in expressive constructions that introduce the point of view of speakers (like
exclamations and expressive epithets (1)), and they do not behave like Complementizer Phrases;
they are blocked from syntactic transformation processes, such as negation and interrogation.
They do not permit adverbial modification. Even though they depart from verbs in that sense,
they can still be affixed by accusative clitic pronouns (e.g., -hu) and can have agentive specifiers
(ʔannʤāhu ‘the success’ (4)).
Proposed Analysis: We propose that these verbs originate as category neutral roots. They
get their verbal identity by merging with verbal functional heads. Undergoing a cyclic movement
operation, the verbal roots move to expressive functional heads that are specified by speech act
1
roles. We argue that the specifier position of a speaker externally merges with either pro that
stands for a speaker (4) or by a particle expressing aggrandizement/despisement such as mā in
expressive verbs and ha in expressive epithets. We show that the speaker position in a speech act
projection is the source of expressivity valuation.

2
 Abisambra, Ingrid; University of Georgia
Cognition and subject selection: A comparative analysis of written and oral narratives in
Spanish discourse.
The Givenness Hierarchy (GH) of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993) proposes that
cognition is a leading factor that affects the selection and use of referring expressions in spoken
discourse. The hierarchy identifies six cognitive statuses (CS) based on speakers’ assumptions
regarding their listeners’ level of attention and memory. These statuses can predict the forms
speakers use to refer to different entities in discourse. Greater levels of attention and memory
predict the use of minimal referring expressions and the opposite corresponds to the use of more
elaborate forms. Blackwell and Lubbers Quesada (2012) revised the hierarchy for Spanish and
tested its predictive power for learners of L2 Spanish. Their results showed that both native
speakers and L2 learners select Spanish subject forms following the CS predicted by the
hierarchy, however, there were differences between the two groups of speakers. Most
importantly, they found that native speakers tend to use the most minimal form possible in order
to successfully retrieve a referent.
The present study is part of a larger project which seeks to determine whether the revised
hierarchy is equally valid for predicting the use of referring forms in spontaneous written
narratives in Spanish, where writers can make fewer assumptions regarding their readers’ level
of attention and memory of the referent.
Twenty native speakers of Spanish viewed a five-minute segment of the Charlie Chaplin
silent film, A Woman, and were asked to narrate in writing what they had seen. The data
corroborates that participants in this study tend to select subject forms that were predicted by the
Givenness Hierarchy, particularly for the CS that are found on either extreme, however,
preliminary findings point to an increased use of definite noun phrases in written narratives,
suggesting that the hierarchy has a stronger predicting power for oral narratives where attention
and memory play a greater role in assuming referent identification.
Distribution and frequencies were calculated for third person subject form, according to
CS. Chi-square tests were used attempting to reject the null hypothesis that “subject forms use is
the same between two production modalities (oral/written)”. Fisher’s Exact tests were run for
relevant categories and logistic regression models were performed for the subject forms where
significant differences were possible. The present study’s main significant results are as follows:
• The revised GH is valid for predicting subject use in written narratives as in oral
narratives but to a lesser extent.
• Writing increases the use of definite noun phrases.

• Writing decreases preference for more minimal forms (null subjects and personal
pronouns), suggesting that writing requires more elaborate forms for referent
retrieval.

References
Blackwell, S.E. and Lubbers Quesada, M. (2012). Third-Person Subjects in Native Speakers' and
L2 Learners' Narratives: Testing (and Revising) the Givenness Hierarchy for Spanish. In K.
Geeslin and M. Díaz-Campos (Eds.), 14th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (pp. 142-164).
Somerville: Cascadilla.
Gundel, J.K., Hedberg, N. and Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive Status and the Form of Referring
Expressions in Discourse. Language, 69(2), 274-307.

3
 Alamillo,
Rosalva, San Diego State University
“Mexicana nacida en el extranjero”: Bilingüismo e identidades en hablantes de español
como lengua de herencia transfronterizos

Difícil es ignorar el contexto social que rodea al multilingüismo en el sur del estado de
California, en dónde lxs latinxs son el grupo étnico más grande (Public Policy Institute of
California, 2020) y donde se han hecho esfuerzos por “proteger, preservar y reforzar”
(California Constitution, Article III, Sec. 6) el inglés mediante la oficialización de dicho idioma
y la implementación de la Proposición 227 en 1998 que eliminó la educación bilingüe en
escuelas públicas hasta finales de 2016 (Kinney, 2018). Como consecuencia, se ha reducido el
español a un estatus minoritario en un contexto multilingüe donde el 41% de la población del
condado de San Diego habla otro idioma que no es inglés y el 23% de la población es hablante
nativo de español (Data USA, 2018).
El cruce fronterizo San Ysidro, uno de los más ocupados del mundo, divide
geopolíticamente a San Diego de Tijuana. Es transitado por unas 120 000 personas diariamente
(Border Report, 2019). No es inusual que algunos residentes de Tijuana crucen a San Diego para
trabajar, estudiar o hacer compras de forma regular, por ello, para muchos ciudadanos de ambas
naciones, dichas entidades funcionan de manera simbiótica. Esta investigación de corte
cualitativo analiza las identidades y las perspectivas sobre el bilingüismo que tienen los
estudiantes transfronterizos hablantes de español como lengua de herencia.
Se analizaron 19 composiciones sobre un tema común de estudiantes universitarios del
condado de San Diego respecto a cómo se identifican a sí mismos los participantes y qué
valoración dan a su propio bilingüismo. Los resultados muestran, contrario a lo que se esperaba,
que los participantes seleccionaron etiquetas de identidad relacionadas con el lugar de origen de
sus padres/abuelos (mexicanx) (79%) que etiquetas de identidades híbridas (mexicoamericano)
(16%) a pesar de que la mayoría de los participantes nacieron y crecieron en los Estados Unidos.
Por otro lado, la mayoría de los participantes otorgaron un valor instrumental al bilingüismo.
Finalmente, se reflexiona sobre los aspectos extralingüísticos que influyen en la construcción de
identidades y la relación entre la lengua, la identidad y contexto socio-político.

Palabras claves: español como lengua de herencia, identidades, bilingüismo, transfronterizo,

estudios de frontera.

4
  Alfaro, Sofia,University of Texas at El Paso
Requiem for Rarámuri: A sociolinguistic analysis

THESIS STATEMENT: Based upon an analysis of Rarámuri sociolinguistic environment and

Mexican Language Policy planning, we argue that Rarámuri will disappear in Mexico
DESCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC: Rarámuri belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family, and it is
considered as an endangered language. The last Mexican official census in 2015 estimates there
are around 75,000 Rarámuri speakers. This language is spoken in the state of Chihuahua,
Mexico. Westerners refer to this language as Tarahumara, whereas members of this Native
American group call it Rarámuri. Mexican demographic records recognize two varieties:
Rarámuri de la Alta and Rarámuri de la Baja (Paciotto 1996, INEGI 2019).
In 2011 a major amendment to Mexican Education System acuerdo 592, policy-makers
claimed that they had done major improvements to preserve native languages in Mexico.
Nevertheless, Amendment 592 Mexican language policy main goal is to teach english and
computer science from a young age. Despite the existence of laws in favor of the preservation
and development of indigenous languages, mexican bureaucrats have failed in the execution the
Indigenous Literacy Programs. Anthropologists, historians and linguists who have studied the
Tarahumara, agree has never been a true institutional support for this minority.
APPROACH: the following research questions will be addressed in these paper: a) What is
the future of Rarámuri in Mexico?; and b) Are the current language policies in Mexico relevant to
the Rarámuri language preservation? The first part of this paper will address question a), based
upon the concepts of diglossia, social attitudes and ethnolinguistic vitality. The second part,
question b), will be addressed through Schiffman’s (1996) language policy framework.

CONCLUSIONS: It will be argued that based upon classic diglossia, Rarámuri presents a
low status in relation to Spanish within the Chihuahua, Mexico region. When Rarámuris are
questioned about the importance of Spanish they answered that it “is for studying, buying, and
speaking when we go to other places” (Paciotto, 2010:170). Rarámuris are well aware of the
utilitarian role of Spanish, which keeps Rarámuri on a lower status. As for the social attitudes,
mestizos show a (historical)negative attitude towards Rarámuri, whereas Rarámuri have an
adverse attitude towards literacy programs developed by the Mexican government. In terms of
linguistic vitality Rarámuri language continues to have low status in Mexican society, and a
decreasing population of Rarámuri due to rural migration. The second part analyzes the main
problem of language policy in Mexico, government centralization. The disconnection between
the policy-makers and the lower variety speaker has contributed to the failure of governmental
efforts to preserve this language

REFERENCES (PARTIAL LIST)

Schiffman, Harold F. Linguistic culture and language policy. Psychology Press, 1998.
Paciotto, C. (2010). Language and Literacy Planning and Local Contexts: The Case of a
Rarámuri Community. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 41(2), 161- 180.
Paciotto, C. (1996). The Tarahumara of Mexico.

5
 Alvarado,
Kristhel, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
“Ajeno”, “innecesario” e “impronunciable”: ideologías lingüísticas sobre el lenguaje
inclusivo en el discurso de la Real Academia Española

En la última década, las discusiones sobre el sexismo en el lenguaje han cobrado

relevancia. De manera particular, la Real Academia Española, la institución de mayor jerarquía
en cuanto a la normatividad lingüística del español, ha sido ampliamente criticada por la posición
de rechazo que ha tomado frente al lenguaje inclusivo. Sin embargo, dicha institución también ha
encontrado respaldo por parte de académicos que defienden el uso del masculino genérico. El
objetivo de este trabajo es dar cuenta de las ideologías lingüísticas presentes en el discurso de la
RAE al interactuar con usuarios que envían consultas que giran en torno al lenguaje inclusivo. A
partir del marco teórico propuesto para el estudio de las ideologías lingüísticas (Irvine y Gal
1995, Kroskrity 2000, Rosa y Burdick 2017), se analizaron interacciones entre la RAE, desde su
cuenta oficial en Twitter, y distintos usuarios que realizan preguntas acerca del uso de las grafías
“x” y “e” como marcas de género inclusivo. En ese sentido, este trabajo también busca analizar
las formas en las que las sociedades han entendido el lenguaje/las lenguas, y cómo los individuos
al interior de estas sociedades reciben y resisten las formas dominantes y hegemónicas (García,
Flores y Spotti 2017). A partir del análisis de las interacciones, se identificó, en el discurso de la
RAE, dos ideologías lingüísticas contrapuestas sobre la concepción de “lengua”: por un lado,
como sistema abstracto y estático que no puede ser modificado por los hablantes; por otro lado,
como un sistema que puede cambiar y aceptar las formas mencionadas, pero siguiendo ciertos
requerimientos impuestos desde la misma Academia. Ambas visiones conforman un posible
dilema ideológico que se explicaría a partir de los intereses particulares que la RAE desea
cumplir como, por ejemplo, erradicar estas formas novedosas. Respecto de la segunda visión
identificada, la posibilidad del cambio lingüístico, se encontró que, en esta, existen ideologías
lingüísticas relacionadas con quiénes son los hablantes “ideales” para propiciar ⎯y legitimar⎯
un cambio lingüístico. Por ejemplo, la RAE señala que estos deben ser “cultos”, con “buen nivel
de instrucción y conciencia lingüística”, lo cual pone de manifiesto ciertas relaciones
indexicales. Considerando estos hallazgos, este trabajo contribuye a las investigaciones del
campo interdisciplinario de la sociolingüística crítica. Este enfoque crítico postestructuralista
permite explorar cómo las ideologías lingüísticas dominantes son cómplices en la formación de
posiciones de sujeto (García, Flores y Spotti 2017). Así, se puede concluir que la posición de la
RAE desplegada en sus interacciones no solo funciona para deslegitimar las formas inclusivas,
sino que contribuye en la construcción de la identidad de los sujetos que usan el lenguaje
inclusivo. Se les coloca como parte de un colectivo que busca imponer formas “artificiosas” e
“innecesarias”, y se les caracteriza como “no cultos”, categoría que condensa una serie de
características sociales adicionales (posición socieconómica, literacidad, entre otros).

6
Anderson, Salena, Valparaiso University
 
Faith, Culture, and Language Learning: Negotiating Tensions in Mission and Promotion of
a Community-Based ESL Program
Previous TESOL scholarship considers both the tensions in community-based ESL
programs with a faith-based tradition (e.g., Chao & Kuntz, 2013 and Durham & Kim, 2019) and
some of the opportunities (e.g., Dytynyshyn, 2008 and Smith & Carvill, 2000). For instance, Chao
& Kuntz (2013) find in considering a church-based ESL program that “Christian principles,
norms, and values are imposed on the adult learners” (p. 466). Dytynyshyn (2008) takes a more
neutral stance, suggesting that collaboration with a “faith-based community” might help the ESL
program to better identify a specific community to serve in the case that the faith- based
community includes non-native speakers of English. Given the potential tensions between
language-related learning objectives and a faith-related mission, context, or history, this research
explores how a community-based ESL program with a faith-based history and leadership
negotiates its discussion of faith in relation to discussion of the program’s mission of language
learning and teaching. In particular, this research provides a case study of a program in Northwest
Indiana that presents its mission as providing its students “educational services and support
needed to thrive in their new community” while framing its history and leadership as being
connected to the Christian tradition. This study documents the organization’s attempt to note their
history as a faith-based program connected with a Spanish-speaking church to the broader
organization in operation today.
This research provides a discourse analysis of a collection of promotional resources
produced by or for the program and made publicly available through their website, including a
short promotional video, assorted tabs available on their website (including their pages on faith,
the organization’s mission, history, and program overviews, as well as student and volunteer
testimonials), and a job description for executive director. As the different promotional materials
were created by different writers (e.g., a student-produced video and program-produced web text)
or for different audiences (e.g., the different sections addressing volunteers, community
members, donors, and prospective employees), this discourse analysis presents a nuanced picture
of this community-based ESL program and its attempts to negotiate the identities of its directors,
board members, donors, and tutors with the identities of the p-12 and adult students the program
serves. This research is significant as it points to the complexity of how a faith-related
community-based ESL program may understand its mission or present its mission to different
audiences.

Works Cited
Chao, X., & Kuntz, A. (2013). Church-basedESL program as afiguredworld:Immigrant adult
learners,language, identity, power.LinguisticsandEducation,24(4),466-478.
Durham, L., & Kim, S. (2019). Training dilemmas and recommendations with volunteer
instructors in small, faith-based adult ESL programs. TESOL Journal, 10(1), e00374.
Dytynyshyn, N. (2008). Launching a community-based ESL program. Concordia Working
Papers in Applied Linguistics, 1, 55-75.
Smith, D., & Carvill, B. (2000). The gift of the stranger: Faith, hospitality, and foreign language
learning. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

7
Arias Alvarez, Alba, Roanoke College & Gubitosi, Patricia, University of Massachusetts
Amherst
Linguistic Identity Negotiation in a Multilingual Family

Diasporas do not always have stable and static identities bonded to the past or to the
homeland (Canagarajah 2012). In fact, they are changing communities (Hall 1990), open to
lateral connections (Clifford, 1994) in which their members are in continuous negotiation,
especially with the dominant community in their new home, producing, contesting and
preventing power conflicts. Current research in social identities conceptualizes identities as “an
interactional accomplishment, produced and negotiated in discourse” (Pavlenko and Blackledge
2004:13). It is through a dialogical relationship with the social surroundings that identities are
linguistically constructed. Therefore, since identity is negotiated through discourse, studying the
linguistic behavior of these groups is essential because it helps us understand the ways in which
they use language to index new meanings and identities.
The strong connection among language, culture and identity allows people to build a
sense of group based on social constructs that are seen as boundaries between individuals.
“Language may be used as a way to preserve those boundaries, cross them, or subvert them
altogether” (Fought, 2006: 17), and when people learn a second language in the diaspora, they
have different choices to articulate their identities; at the same time, these choices may
encourage them to move between boundaries assimilating into new communities, or building
new and mixed linguistic identities (Itakura and Humphreys, 2008; Giampapa, 2004).
Although investigation of linguistic diaspora communities has increased in recent years,
especially those that focus on ethnic-minority, migrant groups, there has not been extensive
research on how linguistic identity is constructed within migrant multi/bilingual families
(Clifford, 1994; Niño Murcia and Rothman, 2008; King, 2013, among others). In order to fill this
gap in the literature, this paper uses an ethnolinguistic observational methodology along with
sociolinguistic interviews to analyze linguistic identity negotiation processes among three
generations of women from the same family, grandmother, mother and daughter of Galician
origin, who have crossed linguistic and cultural borders when they migrated to Asturias, Spain.
Results show a reconciliation of the Galician diasporic identity with other identities that
arise in our participants’ new social practices in the diaspora. Such identity negotiation is
demonstrated through translanguaging strategies, which allow multilingual family members to
communicate with each other and serve as performative discourses that enact speakers’ complex
identities, avoiding feelings of alienation or displacement.

Keywords: Linguistic attitudes, migrant family, translanguaging practices, minority languages.

References:

Canagarajah, S. and Silberstein, S. 2012. Diaspora Identities and Language. Journal of

Language, Identity, and Education, 11: 81–84.
Clifford, J. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 302–338.
Fought, C. 2006. Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge University Press: New York, NY.
Giampapa, F. 2004. The politics of identity, representation and the discourse of self-
identification: Negotiating the periphery and the center. In A. Pavlenko and A.
Blackledge (eds.) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (pp. 192-218).
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
8
Itakura, H. and Humphreys, G. 2008. Coping with isolation in negotiation of identities: the role
of language views. In: M Mantero, PC Miller & JL Watzke (Eds.), Readings in language
studies (Vol. 1), p. 193-210. International Society for Language Studies.
King, K. A. 2013. A Tale of Three Sisters: Language Ideologies, Identities, and Negotiations in a
Bilingual, Transnational Family, International Multilingual Research
Journal, 7:1, 49-65.
Niño-Murcia, M. and Rothman, J. 2008. Bilingualism and Identity. Spanish at the crossroads
with other languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Pavlenko, A and Blackledge, A. 2004. Introduction: New theoretical approaches to the study of
negotiation in multilingual contexts. In: Pavlenko, Aneta and Adrian Blackledge (eds.)
Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Multilingual Matters: Clevendon,
England, 2004.

9
Basterretxea Santiso, Gorka; Georgetown University
Politeness, Formality or Pragmatically Non-Markedness? A Comparison of Basque and
North Peninsular Spanish Second Person Singular Pronouns
One of the ways in which speakers of a language manage and create their interpersonal
relationships is through the use of second person singular pronouns, which may vary across
languages no matter how much in contact they are. A number of studies have already been
published in relation to this topic in Spanish (e.g., Blas Arroyo, 1995; Calderón Campos &
Medina Morales, 2010; de Jonge & Nieuwenhuijsen, 2012; León-Castro Gómez, 2014) and in
Basque (e.g., Alberdi, 1995; de Rijk, 2008; Wolpert, Mancini & Caffarra, 2017), mainly to delimit
their scope of uses, especially in the case of Basque. As far as this presentation is concerned, no
significant comparative studies regarding these two neighboring languages have been recently
developed within the field of intercultural sociolinguistics. Thus, taking the second person singular
pronouns of the northern part of Peninsular Spanish–tú and usted– and those of Basque–hi and
zu–as the point of departure, the present study aims to discover if the introduced pronouns of both
languages can be paralleled in terms of politeness or formality. This project reexamines some of
the previously published empirical studies regarding the uses of North Peninsular Spanish
pronouns (e.g., Sampedro Mella, 2016; Sanromán Vilas, 2010; Pedroviejo Esteruelas, 2006), while
the data on Basque pronouns comes from the database created by Basterretxea Santiso in 2018.
This database is formed by 540 conversations from a Basque-language television series called
Goenkale: these conversations were particularly obtained through the 60 episodes from the 8th
season of the aforementioned series that were broadcast in 2008 in Euskal Telebista (the Basque
Public Television). The present study draws conclusions about the difficulties to compare second
person singular pronouns in the two aforementioned languages in contact due to the existence of a
socially non-marked pronoun–zu– in Basque, different from Spanish. Then, this research
demonstrates that zu is not actually always a polite or formal pronoun traditionally believed to be
analogous to Spanish usted, but a pragmatically non-marked pronoun instead. Although a reliable
correlation can be established in only asymmetrical usage of second person singular pronouns in
the two languages between usted and zu, evidence from the analyzed conversations and
reexamined publications show that while in Spanish symmetrical tú is employed to create
solidarity or closeness between speakers, symmetrical zu is a non-marked second person singular
pronoun, making it possible to use it in both intimate and respectful conversation.

References

Alberdi, J. (1995). The development of the Basque system of terms of address and the allocutive
conjugation. In J. I. Hualde, J. A. Lakarra & R. L. Trask (Eds.), Towards a history of the Basque
language (pp. 275-293).
Basterretxea Santiso, G. (2018). Los pronombres de segunda persona del singular y la cortesía
verbal en español peninsular y en euskera (Publication No. 10786004) [Master dissertation,
Illinois State University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
Blas Arroyo, J. L. (1995). Tú y usted: dos pronombres de cortesía en el español actual. Datos de
una comunidad peninsular. Revista ELUA, 10, 21-44.
Calderón Campos, M., & Medina Morales, F. (2010). Historia y situación actual de los
pronombres de tratamiento en el español peninsular. In M. Hummel, B. Kluge & E. Vázquez
Laslop (Eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico (pp. 196-222).
De Jonge, B., & Nieuwenhuijsen, D. (2012). Forms of address. In J. I. Hualde, A. Olarrea &
E. O’Rourke (Eds.), The handbook of Hispanic linguistics (pp. 247-262).
De Rijk, R. P. G. (2008). Standard Basque: A progressive grammar (Vol. 1). Cambridge, MA:
10
The MIT Press.
León-Castro Gómez, M. (2014). Sobre el empleo de la segunda persona del singular como
mecanismos de indefinición referencial en el habla culta. Difeerncias entre las formas tú/vos y
usted. Lingüística y literatura, 65, 37-63.
Sampedro Mella, M. (2016). Las formas de tratamiento ‘tú y usted’ en el español centro- norte
peninsular. Estudio sociolingüístico. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Sanromán
Vilas, B. (2010). Sociolingüística de los pronombres de segunda persona: estudio contrastive entre
dos ciudades españolas. Neuphilologische Mitteillungen, 111(4), 479-502.
Wolpert, M., Mancini, S., & Caffarra, S. (2017). Addressee Identity and Morphosyntactic
Processing in Basque Allocutive Agreement. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1-11.

11
Bergeson, The University of Texas at Austin
A comparison of Spanish loanwords in two varieties of Ecuadorian Kichwa Kelsey
Lexical borrowing, defined as the integration and dissemination of copied lexical material
in a recipient language’s lexicon, is common and well-documented cross-linguistically. However,
languages vary widely in the degree and character of lexical borrowing that they permit. Among
other factors, speaker ideologies which privilege linguistic purity are often noted to be correlated
with lower rates of borrowing. This paper compares the borrowing behavior of two varieties of
Ecuadorian Kichwa that are closely related but which have different sociohistorical contexts that
foster distinct language ideologies. The results suggest that in this case, speakers’ ideas about
language purity may not be a strong contributing factor for lexical borrowing from Spanish.
As a result of the Loanword Typology Project, a collaborative effort to document lexical
borrowing across a large sample of languages, Haspelmath and Tadmor (2009) suggest that
languages which exhibit the highest rates of borrowing tend to share certain traits. High
borrowing languages are often spoken in contexts with widespread multilingualism, have a
sociopolitically subordinate minority status, have a relatively short history in the area where they
are spoken which may not be their ancestral homeland, and are spoken by speakers who do not
hold ideologies of language purism and who have not enacted significant standardization
practices. Often, the inverse conditions are true for low borrowing languages. As part of that
project, Imbabura Kichwa, a highland variety, is classified as a “high borrower”.
While all Ecuadorian Kichwa varieties share, to some degree, the first three conditions
listed above, some highland Kichwa varieties are spoken by speaker groups with stronger
ideologies of language purism than those of speakers of lowland varieties. Bouchard (2013)
reports negative attitudes toward language mixing and language change among Imbabura
speakers. Further, the variety spoken in the Imbabura province has been overrepresented in the
development of a standardized variety, called Unified Kichwa, used in bilingual education. On
the other hand, Wroblewski (2012) reports among lowland speakers in the Upper Napo region
ideologies that value authenticity, which speakers frame in contrast to negative attitudes toward
standardization. This may lead us to predict that Lowland Ecuadorian Kichwa is likely to be
more amenable to lexical borrowing. Nevertheless, the results presented in this paper indicate
that lexical borrowing is more pervasive in Imbabura Kichwa than in Lowland Ecuadorian
Kichwa.
This paper examines lexical items for 711 word meanings using a dictionary of three
lowland varieties (Orr and Wrisley 1981) and a dictionary-based word list of Imbabura Kichwa
(Gómez Rendón and Adelaar 2009). The Lowland Ecuadorian Kichwa word list is found to
contain fewer loanwords from Spanish than the Imbabura Kichwa word list, which suggests that
linguistic purism does not bear a meaningful correlation to lexical borrowing in this context.
Additionally, differences in the distribution of loanwords across semantic fields and parts
of speech are observed and discussed. Finally, some social and historical differences between the
two speaker groups are noted as potentially contributing factors to the observed borrowing
patterns.

12
Bernardo-Hinesley, Western Washington University; Alba Arias Álvarez, Roanoke
College, Covadonga Sánchez Alvarado, Winona State University; Andie Faber,
Kansas State University; Fiona Dixon, Amherst College
 
Peddling Linguistic Knowledge in University Language Programs Sheryl
The 2007 report by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Modern Language Association regarding
world languages and higher education curriculum states that the structure of an undergraduate
language program should take into account the student learning outcome goal of fostering deep
translingual and transcultural competence. Such goal places value on one’s ability to operate
between languages. The “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a
Changed World” further indicates the following:
Students are educated to function as informed and capable interlocutors… They are also
trained to reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language
and culture. They learn to comprehend speakers of the target language as members of foreign
societies and to grasp themselves as Americans — that is, as member of a society that is
foreign to others. They also learn to relate to fellow members of their own society who speak
languages other than English. (4)
The need to foster meaning and worldview imparted in languages relates to critical
language awareness. That said, using the case of Spanish undergraduate programs as a point of
departure, this panel session provides details regarding linguistic information that can be
integrated in instruction and its approaches in order to promote critical language awareness and
facilitate interest towards studies in literature, culture, and linguistics.
The intended audience for the roundtable will include graduate students, and early and mid-to-
late career scholars. Among the questions for discussion are the following:
▪ How can the integration of linguistic information foster translingual and transcultural
competence?
▪ How can the integration of linguistic information promote self-awareness and self-
reflection in relation to one’s community and the world?
▪ How can the integration of linguistic information enable the capacity of students as capable
interlocutors of the target language?
▪ How can the integration of linguistic information encourage understanding of linguistic
varieties and language variation?
▪ How can the integration of linguistic information bring visibility to the linguistic diversity
in the United States?
▪ How can the integration of linguistic information enable the discussion concerning
discrimination through language?
▪ How can knowledge gained through the integration of linguistic information support other
aspects of language use such as literary analysis, translation, and intercultural competence?
▪ How can the integration of linguistic information cultivate interest towards research
involvement?
▪ How do current conditions from academic undergraduate language programs encourage the
integration of linguistic information?
This roundtable presents a presider and four participants, none of whom will deliver prewritten
presentations or position papers. Maximum time will be freed for live talk participation, and
active engagement between panelists and attendees. The presider and participants (Arias
Álvarez, Bernardo-Hinesley, Dixon, Faber, and Sánchez Alvarado) will offer perspectives from
their instruction of language courses, coordination of language courses, and instruction of
 Spanish linguistics courses.

13
Boyero, Lara, University of Oregon
Soy mujer, inmigrante y latina: estudio interseccional del capital lingüístico en mujeres
latinas inmigrantes.

De acuerdo con el “Migration Policy Institute”, el porcentaje de inmigración latina en

Oregón ha doblado de un 25.8%, desde 1990, a un 42%, en 2017. A pesar de las reivindicaciones
multiculturalistas de Oregón, existe un entorno político y cultural donde la xenofobia tiene lugar,
dando lugar a un aislamiento y miedo entre los miembros de la comunidad latina. En la mayoría
de las familias latinas, se espera que las mujeres sean la principal fuerza vinculante de la familia,
por lo que la idea de “hogar” es creada a través de las interacciones de las mujeres en todo el
sector servicios. Las mujeres latinas interactúan en un ambiente hostil y discriminatorio en
muchos de los supermercados, tiendas, escuelas o servicios públicos de salud donde existe un
problema lingüístico, racial y de clase. Por lo tanto, estas mujeres enfrentan una discriminación
debido a una jerarquía basada en actitudes e ideologías que arrincona sus prácticas lingüísticas en
el plano público (Fishman 2005). Este racismo es fácilmente “visible”, por ejemplo, a través de
ataques verbales hacia inmigrantes en los que estos reciben gritos como: “make America great
again. We speak English here. Go back to your country”. Sin embargo, hay actos de
discriminación más sutiles que son difíciles de percibir, que se han normalizado y perpetuado, y
que requieren un examen más detallado, algo de lo que se está ocupando la raciolingüística (Rosa
2018, Flores y Rosa 2015).
Por tanto, en este trabajo, recojo los testimonios de cinco mujeres latinas residentes de una
población en el Noroeste del Pacífico a partir de entrevistas semi-estructuradas, basadas en cómo
es su interacción en el sector servicios del lugar en donde viven. Apoyándome en el análisis del
discurso y la teoría raciolingüística, analizo sus testimonios con el objetivo de: (i) observar cómo
sus interacciones personales en el plano público1 afectan, o no, en el mantenimiento y transmisión
del español a sus hijos y (ii) analizar sus ideologías y actitudes lingüísticas hacia el español,
inglés, y/o spanglish a partir de las vivencias fuera de la casa.
Así, en sus testimonios se puede advertir que algunas de las informantes sí identifican la
responsabilidad del “sujeto que escucha”2, aunque no son del todo conscientes de cómo les influye
en sus actitudes lingüísticas; y también reconocen la existencia de una racialización que privilegia
a los hablantes de L2 por encima de los hablantes de herencia. Por último, todas ellas aluden al
“racismo sistémico” con el que saben que batallan en su día a día tras usar el español o el
spanglish y algunas sí evidencian cómo ejercen su propia agencia a partir del empoderamiento tras
ciertas situaciones vividas, revelando una resiliencia que les permite navegar ante el racismo
(lingüístico) que viven.

14
Callesano, Salvatore, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
People who say dale live here: discovering perceptual communities in Miami
Empirical discussions within the field of ‘Spanish in the United States’ have labeled
Miami-Dade County in South Florida as “different” due to the immense dialect and national origin
diversities, the presence of the Spanish language across the entire socioeconomic class system,
among other factors (Carter & Lynch, 2015). The contact among various national origin varieties
of Spanish in a globalized setting like Miami has led researchers to ask questions not only about
language contact (Lynch, 2017; Fernández Parera, 2017; Carter, López Valdez, & Sims, 2020;
Carter & D’Alessandro Merii, forthcoming), but also questions of how speakers of different
varieties evaluate one another (Alfaraz, 2002, 2014, 2018; Author’s Work, 2018; Author’s Work,
2019). While most of the language attitude work in Miami has been conducted through survey
methods, only one project to date has addressed local linguistic evaluations by using perceptual
dialectology (Garzon, 2017), a longstanding method in sociolinguistics (see Long & Preston,
2002). These mapping methods have been used primarily at country and state levels; however,
few perceptual dialectology studies have gone further to investigate language perception among
one city’s neighborhoods.
The current paper addresses how resemiotized language (Leppänen et al., 2014) ostensibly
unique to Miami, which was collected through translocal new media (Androutsopoulos, 2014) on
Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, are conceptualized in terms of neighborhood associations.
Examples of the “Miami-specific” lexicon include dale ‘various meanings,’ comer mierda ‘to be
bored,’ and comemierda ‘asshole,’ among numerous others. The methodology employed in the
current paper follows from Garzon (2017) and Bijvoet and Fraurud (2016) in that it puts micro-
level features of a city (i.e. neighborhoods) at the forefront of a broader discussion of speech
communities by asking participants to associate lexicalized expressions with perceived
neighborhood residence. Young adult participants in Miami (N = 98) completed a perceptual
dialectology survey in Qualtrics, which resulted in heat maps. Those data, which consist of counts
per neighborhood, were analyzed using Chi-square in R (R Core Team, 2019) to test for
significance among the neighborhood associations during the heat mapping tasks. Results were
analyzed in the aggregate and according to the national origin background (29 Cuban vs. 82 non-
Cuban) and the heritage speaker status of the participants (19 non-heritage speakers vs. 58
heritage speakers of Spanish).
Aggregate results show that the expressions are strongly associated with Miami’s Cuban
American neighborhoods, Little Havana and Hialeah. The results also show differences of
‘associative specificity,’ where for Cubans and heritage speakers of Spanish the items represent
Cuban Miami specifically and, for non-Cubans and non-heritage speakers, they are indexical of a
broader concept of Miami. In addition to demonstrating a new heat mapping method, the current
paper demonstrates how the spread of social media and the immense variation found within U.S.
Spanish, as a result of generational change, bilingualism, continued immigration, and
globalization, have complicated our understanding of Spanish- speaking communities in the U.S.
Finally, the results provide evidence for the concept of ‘perceptual communities,’ which
encompass perceptual discontinuities and shed new light on our understanding of ‘speech
community.’

15
Campos-Astorkiza, Rebeka, Oihane Muxika-Loitzate, Katriese DeLeon, Kendall
Locascio & Shannon Sullivan, The Ohio State University
How early should we teach pronunciation? Sound category formation in beginner and
intermediate learners
Explicit instruction of pronunciation has been shown to have a positive impact on second
language (L2) learner’s production of the L2 sound system (e.g. Gonzalez Lopez and Counselman
2012, Camus-Oyarzún 2016). However, it is still unclear whether this type of instruction benefits
beginners and intermediate/advanced learners similarly (Camus-Oyarzún 2016). Furthermore,
differences in the impact of phonetic instruction would shed light on the process of phonological
development. One hypothesis is that beginners, starting to create their L2 sound categories, might
present a more malleable system and thus, exhibit greater improvements from phonetic
instruction, while more advanced learners, whose L2 categories are more formed (or have reached
a “learning plateau”; Flege 1988, Munro & Derwing 2008), might show more resistance to
improvement due to instruction.
In order to test this hypothesis, we analyze the production of the Spanish voiceless stops /p,
t, k/ by learners whose L1 is English, and compare two types of learners who received
pronunciation instruction as part of a Spanish college class. The data was gathered as part of a
bigger project, See your Speech, which combines research and teaching at the college level. More
precisely, the data comes from a teaching module developed for Spanish college classes, where
students record themselves reading words in Spanish via a web-based interface and get instant
feedback on their pronunciation. Students complete the module at two timepoints: the beginning
(T1) and end of the semester (T2). This study includes two sets of participants: Group I (N=15)
are third-semester students taking a language course that includes explicit phonetic instruction,
and Group II (N=20) are Spanish majors/minors taking an upper-level Spanish pronunciation
course. For the data analysis, we measure the participants’ VOT during /p, t, k/
since this is the main difference between Spanish (short VOT) and English (long VOT, aspiration)
voiceless tops. To answer our research question, we use linear regression to explore the effect of
Group, Timepoint and their interaction on the VOT duration. In addition, we also consider the
effect of stress, word position and stop place of articulation.
Results show differences in VOT between the two groups but these differences interact with
other factors, especially with Timepoint. For Group II, there is no significant overall difference in
VOT between T1 and T2, although VOT decreases in stressed syllables for /p, t/ in T1 vs. T2.
For Group I, results show that they display a significant reduction in their VOT in T2 vs. T1, and
while they have longer VOTs in T1 than Group II, they seem to end the semester with overall
shorter VOTs than Group II. These initial results suggest that explicit instruction of
pronunciation has a greater impact on beginners’ than on intermediate learners’ sound
production. This supports a Spanish curriculum that includes pronunciation teaching as early as
possible. Furthermore, our findings might indicate differences in degree of category formation
with more advanced learners having a more solidified category system, contrasting with
beginners who display less solid categories and are more prone to changes due to instruction.

16
Raisa Canete Blazquez, Oregon State University
Cultural and Linguistic Inclusiveness in the US University Spanish Classroom

In the last decades, students with different profiles and needs than those of traditional
students have diversified the US education system (Kramsch, 2014). This phenomenon has been
widely debated in higher education, with scholars like Ahmed (2012) and Urciuoli (2013)
arguing that US universities promote diversity in ways that reinforce inequality. This paper seeks
to contribute to these debates by raising awareness of the importance of attending to the unique
backgrounds of the students, creating opportunities for the inclusion of different cultural and
linguistic elements in teaching and learning approaches (Burke, 2012).
Attention to diversity and inclusion has been increasingly present in research on second
language acquisition, with implications for both teachers and researchers. Some scholars critique
traditional approaches in departments of foreign language education that address the needs of
students who identify with English monolingualism (Ortega, 1999; Schwartz, 2018). Others
focus on the need to apply culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995), responsive (Gay, 2018),
and sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) to challenge notions about the intersection of
culture and teaching. However, existing studies have not adequately framed the experiences of
multilingual and multicultural students in first-year university Spanish classes. I argue that these
students are particularly vulnerable to the monoglossic language ideologies (Heller, 1999) that
are deeply embedded in departments of foreign languages (Valdés et al., 2003).
Informed by the theoretical foundation of Critical Race Theory and Culturally
Responsive Pedagogies (CRP), this ethnographic study in first-year university Spanish classes
focuses on their adaptation to increasingly diverse classrooms, arguing that the needs of
multilingual and multicultural students are commonly not addressed in Spanish as a foreign
language curricula. Using ethnographic and grounded theory methods (Charmaz & Mitchell,
2007), data from participant observations and interviews with students and instructors help
answer the main research question: How are multilingual students’ cultural and linguistic
resources recognized and valued in university Spanish classes? Guided by critical perspectives in
language education, I use CRP rubrics, and consider heteroglossic language ideologies (García,
2009) and critical language awareness (Alim, 2005) to examine how current approaches to
Spanish education address linguistic and cultural diversity in the classroom and to suggest areas
for improvement.
The results of this project shed light on the experiences of multilingual and multicultural
students in the Spanish classroom, as affected by dominant approaches to language education.
Failure to recognize and value diversity in the Spanish classroom can hinder the students’
learning experiences and opportunities for success. In fact, when given the opportunity, students
with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds will use them to advance their learning.
Therefore, this paper aims to inform the development of curricula and teaching approaches of
Spanish as a foreign language in higher education to foster diversity and inclusion through
equitable learning opportunities. With that, I intend to support the broader argument that a
change in the student body should also come with adaptations in the curriculum to address the
needs of all students in the classroom (Leeman, 2014), especially those for whom the class was
not initially designed.

17
 Carcamo-Garcia, Marina; University of Arizona
Intra-sentential code-mixing in L2 Portuguese acquisition of Venezuelan immigrants in
Brazil
The acquisition of cognate languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, presents specific
advantages and challenges, such as more permeability and early L2/L3 production, compared to
more distant languages (Carvalho, 2002, 2013; Carvalho, Freire & Da Silva, 2010). While L2
acquisition between these languages has been studied in formal instruction settings (Almeida
Filho, 2001; Scaramucci, 2013), more research is needed in natural acquisition (without previous
instruction), such as in diasporic contexts. Venezuelans in Brazil have increased 2,088% since
2015 (IOM, 2018), providing a context for studies that analyze cognate language acquisition
patterns and their relation to social factors.
The acquisition patterns and the degree of language proficiency that a speaker possesses
in two languages have been shown to correlate with the type of code-switching used (Poplack,
1980, 2013; McClure, 1981; Rakowsky, 1989; Toribio, 2001). Using the Muysken's (2000)
code-mixing (CM) model (insertions, alternations and congruent lexicalizations (CL)), the
present exploratory study aims to determine the overall distribution of Portuguese-Spanish
code-mixing/switching patterns of nine Venezuelans (native speakers of Spanish) living in the
Campinas region (Brazil) and whether two extralinguistic factors, length of residence and social
networks, have an influence on the distribution of these patterns. The overall exploratory results
indicate that: a) length of residence influences the CM distribution of the participants, since
participants who have lived longer in Brazil overall use more CM; b) social networks do not
influence CM, since the preliminary results do not indicate general patterns due to networks; and
c) the most used CM type is alternations, followed by congruent lexicalizations and insertions.
Furthermore, the qualitative results show that congruent lexicalization, a phenomenon that has
barely been studied by previous
research, presents common patterns across this community, such as intra-word CL (examples are:
"enton" and "alá") and Subj+verb (SV) and Det+head intra-sentential CM (examples are: "yo
falo" and "el dinheiro"). Consequently, this study suggests future research on the relationship
between gradual L2 acquisition and code-mixing/switching patterns between cognate languages.

References

Almeida Filho, J. C. P. (2001) “Uma metodologia específica para o ensino de línguas próximas?”
In Português para estrangeiros interface com o espanhol. 2ª ed. Campinas. Pontes, pp. 9-
21.
Carvalho, A. (2002). “Português para falantes de espanhol: perspectivas de um campo de
pesquisa”. Hispania 85 (3), 597-608.
Carvalho, A. M. (2013). “The field of Portuguese for Spanish Speakers in the U.S.” Portuguese
Language Journal, 7.
Carvalho, A. M., Freire, J. L. & Da Silva, A. J. B. (2010). “Teaching Portuguese to Spanish
Speakers: A Case for Trilingualism”, in Hispania 93 (1), pp. 70-75. American
Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese Stable. Retrieved from:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25703395
McClure, E. (1981). “Formal and functional aspects of the code-switched discourse of bi-
lingual children.” Latino language and communicative behavior ed. by Richard P. Durán,
69–94. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX Publishing.
Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
18
 Poplack, S. (1980). “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English y termino en español: Toward a
typology of code-switching”. Linguistics, 18, 581-618.
Poplack, S. (2013). “The second decade (1973-1983). – ‘Sometimes I'll start a sentence in
Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL’: Toward a typology of code-
switching”, Linguistics, 51(Jubilee), 11-14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0039
Rakowsky, A. (1989). A study of intrasentential codeswitching in Spanish-English bilinguals and
second language learners. Doctoral dissertation, Brown University, Providence, Rhode
Island.
Scaramucci, M. (2013). “A área de Português para Falantes de Espanhol no Brasil”. Portuguese
Language Journal, 7.
Toribio, A. J. (2001) “On the emergence of code-switching competence.” Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition 4:3. 203–231.
 

19
Cardona, Elena; University of California, Riverside
#Chinazo:Narrativas de identidad y duelo migratorio de la diáspora venezolana en las
redes sociales digitales
En este texto examino el rol sociolingüístico de las bromas (sexuales, vulgares o
escatológicas) tipificadas bajo la etiqueta de chinazo en la variedad de español de Venezuela,
como parte de las narrativas de identidad articuladas por la diáspora venezolana resultante de
la oleada migratoria más reciente (2015-2020). Los migrantes venezolanxs están
experimentando cambios sociales, económicos y políticos a múltiples escalas en relación con
la prolongada crisis de Venezuela, pero también, como es de esperarse, con sus procesos de
inserción en las sociedades de los países de acogida, y la experiencia del llamado “duelo
migratorio” (Achotegui 2012). Estos desafíos incluyen la negociación constante de sus
identidades mediante la performatividad de estilos discursivos en muy diversas escalas, desde
la individual y familiar hasta aquella que se relaciona con la pertenencia nacional. En esta
negociación la referencia al chinazo entre los venezolanxs migrantes oscila principalmente
entre dos funciones, no opuestas sino permeables entre sí: el lamento o añoranza por un
espacio-tiempo perdidos, y el gesto de resistencia a la pérdida del lugar de distinción que
acompaña el fenómeno, más aún fuera del territorio venezolano. Dada esta permeabilidad en
la que se cruzan el aquí-ahora y el allá-antes, caracterizo el fenómeno recurriendo a la noción
de “cronotopo” (Bajtin 1989) y reviso la extensión y actualización como “cronotopo
diaspórico” que ha hecho del término Peeren (2006), en tanto función narrativa que articula la
experiencia vivida y la memoria en las identidades de los migrantes venezolanxs.
El abordaje se centra en un estudio de caso para el que entrevisté a una pareja de
migrantes venezolanxs en Southern California, y cuya interacción a propósito del chinazo fue
elicitada por publicaciones en Twitter sobre el tema; considerando que el cruce entre la
condición de migración y las prácticas de comunicación contemporáneas en las plataformas
digitales ha hecho que la experiencia del chinazo mute en su estructura pero también en las
percepciones y actitudes de los hablantes. La definición de estilo, y la relevancia de cómo las
ideologías lingüísticas organizan y racionalizan la distinción sociolingüística (Irvine 2001),
fueron aspectos reveladores para aproximarse a estas actitudes de los hablantes en la
construcción de identidades, a los significados sociales que se generan en el proceso, pero
también a los constructos culturales previos que bien se reproducen en las interacciones
sociales o bien se transforman precisamente porque los sujetos sociales ejercen alguna forma
de resistencia o inversión de los poderes culturales en la performatividad de sus identidades.
En su realización virtual, el chinazo aparece como queja o añoranza por lo perdido pero
también se trata de un espacio-tiempo en el que las mujeres asumen su participación como
reapropiación o desplazamiento de poder del rol masculino. Como reelaboración simbólica y
pragmática del duelo de la migración, el chinazo y sus subsecuentes cronotopos menores es
clave para indagar en esos nuevos relatos de Venezuela fuera del territorio geográfico-político de
la nación, relatos de identidades diseminadas y en resistencia.
Palabras clave: chinazo, cronotopo, identidad, diáspora, migración, humor,
masculinidades, Twitter, Venezuela.

Referencias

Achotegui, Joseba. (2012). Emigrar hoy en situaciones extremas. El síndrome de Ulises. Aloma:
Revista de Psicologia, Ciències de l'Educació i de l'Esport. 30 (2). 79-86.
Bajtin, Mijail M. (1989). “Las formas de tiempo y el cronotopo en la novela. Ensayos sobre

20
 poética histórica”. Teoría y estética de la novela. Madrid:Taurus, pp 237-409.
Irvine, T. Judith. (2001). Style as distinctiveness: the culture and ideology of linguistic
differentiation. In Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic
Variation, pp. 21-43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peeren, Esther. (2006). Through the Lens of the Chronotope: Suggestions for a Spatio- Temporal
Perspective on Diaspora. Thamyris/Intersecting. 13. 67-78.

21
Castañeda Yupanqui, Brenda; Cleveland State University
Kichwa Hatari: Un radioprograma como modelo de mantenimiento de lenguas de la
diáspora indígena
En Nueva York, existe una comunidad de aproximadamente 10 mil inmigrantes del
Ecuador quienes se identifican como “kichwa” o “quichua”: hablantes de un idioma quechua
pertenecientes a una comunidad indígena en su propio país. Al inmigrar a los Estados Unidos,
esta diáspora se identifica no solo a través de sus tradiciones culturales, sino que considera su
lengua como parte inestimable de su identidad kichwa. Sin embargo, al ser simplemente
agrupados con los demás inmigrantes de origen latinoamericano — muchos de los cuales son
hispanohablantes — parte de su proceso de aculturación incluye el rechazo del kichwa y la
asimilación a la cultura estadounidense-latina a través de ambos el español y el inglés.
Como varias lenguas indígenas, el kichwa también tiene su movimiento comunitario, el
cual aboga por la lengua y su mantenimiento a pesar de la distancia y de los varios factores que
dificultan su uso en la vida de estos inmigrantes indígenas. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar
Kichwa Hatari, un radioprograma comunitario basado en la ciudad de Nueva York, como modelo
de una iniciativa “bottom-up” viable para el mantenimiento de lenguas de las varias diásporas
indígenas. Al ser accesibles, polifónicos, pedagógicos e interactivos, los radioprogramas pueden
convertirse en vehículos para la creación de novedosos espacios públicos simbólicos y tangibles,
los cuales son necesarios para reforzar la voz indígena en un contexto migrante, urbano y
heterogéneo.
 

22
Checa-Garcia, Irene, University of Wyoming & Laura Marqués-Pascual, University of
California, Santa Barbara
Where are relatively positioned Heritage Learners of Spanish when it comes to the lexicon?
Lexical Richness Measures in Spanish heritage, native, and L2 learners
Language development in a heritage acquisition context comes with its own challenges
and characteristics; for this reason, heritage language acquisition has often been compared to
that of a first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. The focus of such research
has usually been heritage language grammars. Lexical development has been less visited,
despite the widespread assumption that the lexicon of heritage speakers is usually richer in
some domains (e.g. family relationships) than others (e.g. academic or formal vocabulary).
Recently, a few studies have started looking at lexical development from an experimental
approach, in the form of word recognition tests (Fairclough 2011, Montrul & Foote 2012). The
present study opts for a corpus approach and compares lexical development of HL learners, L2
learners and NS (native speakers) thorough standardized measures of lexical density, lexical
diversity and lexical sophistication. Data was collected from 105 adult learners in these three
different groups, who produced written samples under testing conditions that controlled for topic,
content and extension. Lemmas and content words were extracted in order to calculate the three
indices of lexical development. Lexical sophistication was calculated based on Spanish
frequency data from Corpus del Español (Davies, 2002) using a count-based approach to overall
corpus frequencies, academic subcorpus frequencies and oral subcorpus frequencies.
Preliminary results reveal that not all indices are equally good at discriminating the
three populations. In terms of lexical sophistication no significant differences were found
regardless of the genre. In addition, lexical diversity, even when transformed to compensate
for text length (using Guiraud's and Uber's transformations, Jarvis 2002), appears to be
correlated with extension. Overall, HL learners’ lexical scores lie between L2 learners and NS
scores, but not all the differences are significant.
We conclude the presentation by discussing the possibilities and limitations of these
indices and different ways to compute them (frequencies lists vs. self-extracted corpora
frequencies, count-based vs. band-base approaches to sophistication, necessary
transformations, lemmas vs words as targets, etc.) so they can represent an accurate as
possible picture of language learners' lexical development.

REFERENCES
Davies, M. 2002. Un corpus anotado de 100.000.000 palabras del español histórico y moderno”,
Procesamiento del lenguaje natural, 29, 21-27.
Fairclough, M. 2011. Testing the lexical recognition task with Spanish/English bilinguals in the
United States. Language Testing, 28(2), 273–297. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265532210393151
Jarvis, S. 2002. Short texts, best fitting curves and new measures of lexical diversity,
Language Testing, 19(1), 57-84. doi 10.1191/0265532202lt220
Montrul, S. & Foote, R. 2012. Age of acquisition interactions in bilingual lexical access: A study
of the weaker language of L2 learners and heritage speakers, International Journal of
Bilingualism 18(3), 274–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006912443431
 

23
Christoffersen, Katherine, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley,
Ryan Bessett, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley & Ana Carvalho,
University of Arizona
Building Sociolinguistic Corpora: CESA & CoBiVa
The importance of sharing sociolinguistic data has been the subject of workshops (LSA
2012, 2016), included in publications (Mallinson, 2013) and encouraged by funding agencies
(NSF 2016). In line with these initiatives is the creation of student-based corpora of U.S. Spanish
(e.g., Corpus of Mexican Spanish in Salinas, Spanish in Texas, Corpus de Español en el Sur de
Arizona, Corpus Bilingüe del Valle), in which students take part in building sociolinguistic
corpora. Student-based US Spanish corpora not only provide important data for variationist
research including the opportunity to analyze changes in progress (Torres Cacoullos
& Berry, forthcoming), but also provide students with training in sociolinguistic methods. This
hands-on approach in turn raises sociolinguistic awareness among students, especially among
minority language speakers whose native dialects are often seen as mixed hybrids. In this paper,
we illustrate such a project by explaining step-by-step the involvement of students in the creation
and maintenance of the Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona (CESA) and the Corpus
Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa), the protocols followed to facilitate the sharing of data, and the
development of technologically-aided transcription methods.
CESA and CoBiVa are student-based corpora of sociolinguistic interviews of Spanish-
English bilingual speakers from two border communities in the U.S. Southwest. Inspired by
Labov’s (1984) model of neighborhood studies, we offer internships and classes to graduate and
undergraduate students in which they are trained to conduct sociolinguistic research. Similar to
Nagy’s initiative at the University of Toronto, this research experience provides students who are
native speakers of Spanish as a heritage language with the opportunity to collect data in
their communities and document and analyze their home dialects. The sociolinguistic interviews
are then transcribed following standard protocols by students and are rechecked multiple times
to achieve maximum accuracy. In order to facilitate the sharing of sociolinguistic data, a large
amount of metadata is gathered from the participants yielding a plethora of possible factors for
future researchers to consider. This metadata includes a Bilingual Language Profile (Birdsong,
Gertken, and Amengual, 2012), a demographic questionnaire, speakers' networks, interviewer
information, and field notes. The transcribed interviews and metadata are then uploaded to a
website available to scholars and educators. Finally, in order to maximize student and
community engagement (Labov, 1982; Schilling, 2013, Wolfram, 2013), we use the corpus to
incorporate elements of sociolinguistic diversity in classes for Heritage Language Learners,
Linguistics, and Spanish in the United States. In doing so, this project also counters standard
language ideologies propagated in the language classroom and the community, while combating
bilingual speakers’ linguistic insecurity, which, in turn, is known to contribute to the
maintenance of minority languages (Martínez, 2003; Leeman, forthcoming).
Currently, the corpora are involved in a research project analyzing and testing various
technologically aided transcription methods. These include auto-generated transcription using
Microsoft Stream, voice recognition apps like SpeechNotes, and manual transcription with
ExpressScribe. The study will describe the preliminary results from testing with regard to ease
of use, speech, and accuracy. The researchers hope that these findings will encourage further
development of community-based, community-driven corpora on varieties of Spanish in the
U.S.

References:
Birdsong, D., Gertken, L.M., & Amengual, M. (2012). Bilingual Language Profile: An Easy- to-
24
 Use Instrument to AssessBilingualism. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin.
https://sites.la.utexas.edu/bilingual.
Labov, W. (1982). Building on empirical foundations. In W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (Eds.),
Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam/Phila: John Benjamins, 17-92.
Labov, W. (1984). Field methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In
J. Baugh & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Language in Use. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Leeman, J. (Forthcoming). Critical language awareness in SHL: Challenging the
linguistic subordination of US Latin@s. In K. Potowski (Ed.) Handbook of Spanish as a
Minority/Heritage Language. New York: Routledge.
Linguistics Society of America. (2012). The 86th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of
America. Portland, Oregon.
Linguistics Society of America. (2016). The 90th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of
America. Washington, DC.
Malinson, C. (2013). Sharing data and findings. In C. Mallinson, B. Childs, & G. Van Herk
(Eds.) Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications. NY:
Routedge, 253-257.
Martínez, G. (2003). Classroom based dialect awareness in heritage language instruction: A
critical applied linguistic approach. Heritage Language Journal, 1(1).
Nagy, N. Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto (HLVC).
http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/ngn/HLVC/0_0_home.php.
National Science Foundation (NSF).
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12816&org=N SF
Schilling, N. (2013). Sociolinguistic fieldwork. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Torres Cacoullos, R & G. M. Berry. (forthcoming). Language variation in U.S. Spanish:
Social factors. In K. Potowski (Ed.), Handbook of Spanish as a Minority/Heritage
Language. New York: Routledge.
Wolfram, W. (2013). Community commitment and social responsibility. In J.K. Chambers and
N. Schilling (Eds.), Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd
edn. Malden/Cambridge: Wiley/Blackwell, 557-76.

25
  Colcher, Drew; The University of Texas at Austin
Correction and repair: Co-constructing identity, expertise, and context in the sociolinguistic
interview
Studies of naturalistic learning in second language acquisition often represent correction
and repair as contextually distinct types of interaction. In this view, the classroom involves task-
based correction or negotiation for meaning (Long, 1996), and other spaces involve repair, or
efforts to maintain intersubjectivity between speakers (Eskildsen, 2018). I analyze instances of
both, taken from one-on-one sociolinguistic interviews between a non-native speaker, and first-
and second-generation speakers of Spanish. Like Huth (2010), I argue that the co-occurrence of
negotiation for meaning and maintenance of intersubjectivity problematizes paradigms of
contextually specific interactions in SLA. Utilizing a broad sociocultural approach (Bucholtz &
Hall, 2005) informed by conversation analysis, I focus on identity as a constitutive element of
context by relating correction and repair sequences to co-constructed indexes of language
expertise. I argue that speakers who index “expert” identities engage in more negotiation for
meaning than those who index “non-expert” identities. I also suggest the value of the
sociolinguistic interview as an applied learning tool.

References
Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach.
Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.
Eskildsen, S. (2018). “We’re learning a lot of new words”: Encountering new L2 vocabulary
outside of class. The Modern Language Journal, 102(supplement), 46–63.
Huth, T. (2010). Can talk be inconsequential? Social and interactional aspects of elicited second-
language interaction. Modern Language Journal, 94(4), 537–553.
Long, M. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W.
Ritchie & T. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). San
Diego, CA: Academic Press.
  

26
 Diaz Romero, Camilo Enrique; Instituto Caro y Cuervo
Atlas Tipológico-Holístico de Lenguas Indígenas de Colombia (ATIHOLICO): resultados
preliminares en la zona andina y llanera
En la zona andina y llanera colombiana se hablan lenguas de las familias quechua, chocó,
barbacoa, caribe, arawak, sáliba, guahibo, chibcha, y sin parentesco definido. En esta presentación
se presentan los hallazgos que están surgiendo en la elaboración del Atlas Tipológico-Holístico de
Lenguas Indígenas de Colombia (ATIHOLICO), investigación que ofrece una combinación de la
clasificación rítmica-holística de la Fonología Natural (Donegan & Stampe, 2004), basada en
patrones de acentuación y combinando efectos de los procesos fonológicos con algunas estructuras
morfológicas y sintácticas, con la experiencia de la referenciación territorial propia de la geografía
lingüística moderna (Goebl, 1984; 2001). A partir de los parámetros lingüísticos definidos
(procesos fonológicos involucrados, órdenes de constituyentes y aglutinación y síntesis
morfológica) de lenguas indígenas habladas en las zonas andina y llanera, se identifica, de manera
preliminar, que la mayor parte de las lenguas de estas familias ubicadas en este territorio guardan
más similitudes con el tipo decreciente (con acentuación regular, ausencia de tonos léxicos, con
pies bisilábicos trocaicos, cierta presencia de morfofonología segmental, etc.) que creciente
(Donegan & Stampe, 2002). Estos resultados pueden contribuir a precisar bajo qué criterios se
puede seguir expandiendo y actualizando el concepto de “lengua andina” previamente propuesto
en Dixon y Aikhenvald (1999).

 Palabras clave
Lenguas indígenas de Colombia habladas en la zona andina y llanera, Clasificación rítmica-
holística, Geografía lingüística, Tipología areal.
 
Referencias bibliográficas
Dixon, R. & Aikhenvald, A. (1999). Introduction. En R. Dixon & A. Aikhenvald (Eds.), The
Amazonian Languages (pp. 1-22). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Donegan, P. & Stampe, D. (2002). South-East Asian Features in the Munda Languages: Evidence
for the analytic-to-synthetic drift of Munda. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society,
28(2), 111-120.
Donegan, P. & Stampe, D. (2004). Rhythm and the synthetic drift of Munda. The yearbook of
South Asian languages and linguistics, 7, 3-36.
Goebl, H. (1984). Dialectology. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
Goebl, H. (2001). Arealtypologie und Dialektologie. En M. Haspelmath, E. König, W.Oesterreicher
& W. Raible (Eds.), Language typology and language universals: An

27
DuBord, Elise, University of Northern Iowa
Bilingualism in Gentefied: Portraying Generational Differences in a Bilingual Community of
Practice

Gentefied, a bilingual television show about a Latinx family in Boyle Heights, East
L.A., premiered in February 2020 to much acclaim on the streaming behemoth Netflix
(Kirkland, 2020; Lloyd, 2020). Show creators Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez and
executive producer América Ferrera, drew on their own complex experiences growing up
Latinx in the United States (Cornish, 2020; Fernandez, 2020). Their portrayal of this
community is that of a contact zone (Pratt, 1987) where multiple cultures and communities
comingle and compete. The topic of gentrification is the backdrop of the first season, as seen
in the ways that Mama Fina's taquería--operated by Casimiro, the family patriarch--begins to
cater to the tastes of white English speakers, but also, the arrival of more economically
advantaged Latinx characters seeking to profit from changing trends and demographics. Hence
"gente" (people) + "gentrification" = Gentefied.
Grounded in discourse analysis (e.g. Wortham & Reyes, 2015), this presentation
explores characters' multilingual language practices focused on the generational divide
between Millennial cousins Ana, Erik, and Chris and members of older generations likes Ana's
mother Beatriz and the cousins' grandfather Casimiro. The exploration of code-switching and
language choice provides a lens for examining bilingual language practices in the portrayal of
a Latinx community of practice. The analysis of the first ten episodes (a total of five hours of
scripted programming) revels that the language practices of immigrant characters are an
inverse reflection of their younger counterparts who grew up in Boyle Heights. In their
interactions with other bilingual characters, older immigrants are portrayed as being more
Spanish dominant, integrating limited English phrases, and code-switching into English for
emphasis (e.g. repetition and expressing anger). On the other end of the bilingual continuum,
the younger generation sticks mainly to English, but adeptly uses Spanish for kinship terms,
expletives, and to cultivate intimacy with both older interlocutors and peers. Yet, these
characters on opposite ends of the bilingual continuum easily communicate with each other,
readily participating in this bilingual community of practice. The expansion of streaming
services such as Netflix has broadened captioning and audio track options, which has not only
created a venue for more authentic representations of bilingual communities, but has also
normalized multilingual language practices among broader audiences, who may speak English,
Spanish, both, or neither.
 

28
 Eddington, David, Brigham Young University
A Corpus Analysis of Some Usage Differences Among Spanish-Speaking Countries1
The Corpus del Español / Web Dialects was used to study usage differences among 21
Spanish-speaking countries. This included variation in verbal morphology: the use of -ra and -se
forms of the past subjunctive (e.g. comiera~comiese), and final -s on 2nd person singular
preterites (e.g. pusistes). The appearance of habían with plural arguments (e.g. habían muchas
riñas), the use of the present perfect to express recent past events (e.g. Esta mañana lo hemos
visto), the use of present subjunctive in embedded clauses following matrix clauses with past
tense subjunctive triggers (e.g. Quería que vengas y no viniste), and rates of clitic climbing (e.g.
Lo iban a ver~iban a verlo) were also examined. Variation in nine vocabulary was also studied
(e.g. elevador~ascensor), gender variation in seven words (e.g. el~la margen), and the use of ser
or estar with consciente.
Among other things, the study provides further quantitative evidence that in Peninsular
Spanish the present perfect is used more often than the preterite when referring to recent events.
The corpus data also reaffirm the observation that in particular Latin American countries the
present subjunctive is used in place of the past subjunctive in embedded clauses preceded by a
matrix clause containing a subjunctive trigger in the past tense. By country literacy rates were
also found to be correlated with higher uses of non-standard habían with plurals and higher uses
of 2nd person singular preterite verbs ending in -s.

*I express my thanks to Lynn Williams and Earl Brown for their input on this paper.
 

29
Faulkner, Tris, Georgetown University
The Changing Face of Counterfactuality: The Use of the Conditional in the Antecedents of
Counterfactual Statements
Counterfactuality refers to the depiction of events that run ‘contrary’ to what is known to
have actually occurred (Iatridou, 2000). This means that although the antecedents of present and
past counterfactuals contain past tense morphology, both encompass a non-past interpretation (p.
244). This ‘fake’ past is what causes a counterfactual such as “If Mary were rich, she would
travel the world” to be understood as revealing that Mary isn’t wealthy now. It has, however,
been well- documented that said ‘were-counterfactuals’ also accept use of the indicative was
(Leech et al., 2009). Contrarily, much less is known about the emergence of a more recent
phenomenon: “the spread of would to [the antecedents] of conditional sentences” (Leech et al.,
2009). While would generally forms part of counterfactual consequents (e.g., If Mary were upset,
she would tell you), its spread to their antecedents appears to be a newer development. For
instance, whereas the conditional would be is said to substitute the subjunctive were in present
counterfactuals (“If there would be complaints…” (COCA, 2018)), the conditional perfect (would
have + past participle) is stated as an alternative for the pluperfect (had + past participle) of past
counterfactuals (“But I think that if it would have been me…” (COCA, 2018)) (Leech et al.,
2009). Thus, in the interest of further investigating these claims, the present study had as its
objective to determine: 1) the extent to which the conditional has become incorporated into the
antecedents of counterfactual propositions; as well as if 2) any semanto-pragmatic differences
result from its use.
Data from English, Jamaican Creole, and Spanish were obtained in order to explore how
this phenomenon materializes in different languages. The Corpus of American English (COCA),
the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbe), and Davies’ Corpus del Español, were
searched in order to find present counterfactual antecedents that involved the use of the
conditional in place of the subjunctive. A similar search was carried out for past counterfactual
antecedents that contained the conditional perfect as a substitute for a pluperfect construction. In
the case of Jamaican Creole, since no such corpora are known to exist, said data was collected
by means of an informant.
Analyses of the corpora and informant data showed that the use of the conditional in
counterfactual antecedents occurs frequently in all three languages. Similar to the subjunctive
and pluperfect forms, the conditional was used in both present and past counterfactual
antecedents to depict hypothetical events (i.e., as opposed to situations that had actually
obtained at some past point in time). The extension of the conditional to counterfactual
antecedents was, thus, seen to be a largely acceptable and semantically non-intrusive practice in
all three of the languages that were examined.

References
COCA. (2018).
Iatridou, S. (2000). The Grammatical Ingredients of Counterfactuality.
Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, C., & Smith, N. (2009). Change in Contemporary English:
A Grammatical Study. international handbook, 2 (pp.1471-1491). Berlín: Walter de
Gruyter.

30
 Fernández Cuenca, Sara & Anthony DeVincentis, Wake Forest University
 
The effects of explicit grammar instruction: what kind of knowledge results from it?
A study with L2 and heritage language learners.
The question of explicit and implicit knowledge has proven to be a crucial matter in
Second Language Acquisition (SLA) (Ellis, 2005; Bowles; 2011; DeKeyser, 2003; Hulstijn,
2005; Paradis, 2004; Ullman, 2001). Whereas native speakers usually make use of implicit
knowledge when engaged in language comprehension and production, L2 learners very often
rely on explicit knowledge, particularly in the early stages of second language learning. One
particular understudied question surrounds the role of language instruction in developing
explicit vs. implicit knowledge. So far, only a few studies, using online and offline methods,
have investigated the impact of various types of instruction on the development of explicit and
implicit L2 knowledge (Sonbull and Schmitt, 2012; Loewen and Erlam, 2006; White and Ranta,
2006; Li, 2010, Morgan-Short et al., 2012). These studies only tested learning gains made by L2
learners; nevertheless, there is a need to also investigate the effects of instruction on a more
recent growing student population, heritage speakers (Montrul and Bowles, 2008, 2010;
Potowski et al., 2009). The study proposed here aims to contribute to the above-mentioned
literature by investigating the potential learning of explicit and implicit knowledge made by
Spanish L2 and heritage learners (HLs) who were exposed to explicit instruction on the Spanish
past subjunctive. A group of 20 Spanish L2 learners1, and 20 HLs2 completed a pre3-, post- and
delayed posttest that consisted of an untimed acceptability judgment task (AJT), intended to tap
explicit knowledge, and an elicited imitation task (EIT) intended to tap implicit knowledge
(Ellis, 2005; Bowles, 2011; Yan et al., 2015). Between sessions 1 and 2, participants received
----explicit instruction, which consisted of a processing instruction treatment (PI) on the past
subjunctive in in-existential clauses4. Preliminary results, based on accuracy data, suggest that
explicit instruction led to positive learning, consistent with previous research that employed a PI
treatment with subjunctive (Farley, 2004; Fernández, 2008). These learning gains occurred with
both learner groups in both tasks (AJT and EIT); however, learning was limited to L2 and heritage
learning to identify or being able to repeat grammatical sentences (similar to Montrul and Bowles,
2008, 2010). Unlike in Potowski et al (2009), our HLs showed learning gains when rating
grammatical sentences. A possible explanation for this finding could be the use of a bimodal
presentation for the stimuli, which according to recent work by Montrul et al., (2015) is better
practice when testing heritage speakers. If we assume that an AJT and EIT tap into explicit and
implicit knowledge, we could say that explicit language instruction led to explicit and implicit
language knowledge in both learner groups.
______________

1
Students completing a minor/major in Spanish (n=20)
2
2nd generation Spanish heritage speakers raised in Chicago/ Chicagoland who grew up with at
least one Spanish speaking parent (Country of origin: mostly Mexico and PR) (n=12)
3
Also used as a screening test to ensure participants were not familiar with the target form.

4
Example of past subjunctive in inexistential clauses: No había trenes que llegaran al centro de la
ciudad.

31
Preliminary findings

32
Freeman, Valerie & Molly Landers, Oklahoma State University
Prelateral mergers in Oklahoma
Oklahoma is in a dialect transition zone, on the periphery of the South and Midland,
blending into the West. Accordingly, it has a mix of features, including Midland LOT-
THOUGHT merger, Southern PIN-PEN merger, and some PRICE-monophthongization (Bakos
2013). This study asked how Oklahomans participate in multiple mergers before /l/ currently in
progress around the country (e.g., feel-fill, sale-sell, pull-pole-pool).
Participants were 90 native Oklahoman English-speakers. Half were college-age (37
female, 8 male), and all but 2 were under age 60; 34 grew up in cities, 38 in rural areas, 18 in
towns (20,000+ residents). Most recorded themselves on smartphones due to COVID-19. The 69
common monosyllabic words analyzed from their wordlists included 3 for each of the 11 non-
rhotic American English monophthongs before /t, d/ or no coda, and 3-6 for each of 8 non- low
vowels before /l/: front /i, ɪ, e, ɛ/ (dubbed ZEAL, CHILL, SNAIL, SMELL classes), and
back/central /u, o, ʊ, ʌ/ (dubbed SPOOL, GOLD, WOOL, GULF). Vowels were delineated in
Praat, and formants (F1, F2) were measured at midpoint (plain vowels) or 35% of vowel duration
(prelaterals). Each speaker’s raw formants were plotted separately with ellipses of 1 standard
deviation around vowel means. For this initial analysis, plots were examined visually for vowel
positions and ellipse overlap.
All vowels backed before /l/, with front vowels also lowering, as expected due to
anticipatory coarticulation. Somewhat contrary to past work in Oklahoma (Bakos 2013), there
was very little evidence of front vowel pairs shifting toward merger before /l/. Back round plain
vowels /u, o, ʊ/ were fronted, but prelateral SPOOL /ul/ and GOLD /ol/ were not, remaining back
and separate from each other and their fronted counterparts (GOOSE, GOAT).
Interestingly, GULF /ʌl/ was backed and raised toward GOLD (e.g., dull → dole), with speakers
falling on a continuum of locations: almost a third approached and almost a third overlapped
GOLD, and some raised it higher, toward SPOOL. Finally, rural speakers showed more raising of
WOOL /ʊl/. About half of urban speakers’ WOOL overlapped GOLD (pull → pole), and half
raised it partway to SPOOL; about 40% of rural speakers’ WOOL also appeared between GOLD
and SPOOL, but another 40% overlapped SPOOL (pull → pool).
In short, working-age Oklahomans showed no prelateral mergers of front vowels in this
wordlist-reading task (no feel-fill or sale-sell), but GULF was shifted toward GOLD (dull →
dole), and WOOL tended to merge with GOLD among urban speakers (pull → pole) but with
SPOOL among rural speakers (pull → pool). To speculate on phonological motivations for these
back- vowel patterns, SPOOL-GOLD merger may be inhibited by sufficient minimal pairs, but the
tiny WOOL (pull, bull, full) and GULF (dull, skull) classes can easily merge with a neighboring
class without creating much lexical confusion. Further analysis of social differentiation (age,
gender, rurality) and task/style (wordlist, passages) is ongoing, as is recruitment of older speakers.
Future work will compare Oklahoman patterns of variation and change to those in
neighboring dialect regions.
 

33
Garcia Pineda, Erick, University of Colorado, Boulder
Intransitividad, complementos circunstanciales y posición del sujeto en el español
conversacional de Puerto Rico
La teoría de la inacusatividad en español sugiere que los verbos inacusativos tienden a
posponer el sujeto al verbo, mientras que los verbos inergativos tienden a seleccionar sujetos
preverbales (Roggia, 2018). No obstante, la posición del sujeto se puede ver modificada por
diferentes motivos informativos (Rivas, 2008), semántico-cognitivos (Chaufe, 1994; Ocampo
2002) o gramaticales (Mayoral Hernández y Alcázar, 2014). En este trabajo se analizaron, en un
corpus conversacional del habla de Puerto Rico, verbos inergativos, inacusativos y copulativos,
con sujetos expresos y en presencia de modificadores como adverbios, frases adverbiales y
complementos. Los ejemplos encontrados en el corpus demuestran una mayor frecuencia de
sujetos preverbales: 62% frente a 38% de sujetos postverbales.
De acuerdo con el análisis estadístico de Varbrul, los factores más significativos que
favorecen la posición posverbal del sujeto son la posición del complemento o fase adverbial y el
peso silábico del sujeto. También resultó significativo la identificabilidad y la carga informativa.
La interpretación de los resultados sugiere que los factores sintácticos tienen un papel más
importante en la determinación de la posición del sujeto. Esto no concuerda, no sólo con la teoría
de la inacusatividad, sino con la creencia generalizada de que los factores que guían el orden de
los constituyentes en español son los factores pragmáticos. De esta manera, los resultados
coinciden con la teoría de Alfonso Vega y Melis (2013) sobre el comportamiento sintáctico
biactancial de los verbos intransitivos en español. Finalmente, este trabajo abona a la discusión
sobre el comportamiento divergente del español caribeño, en términos de la posición del sujeto
(Dauphinais Civitello y Ortiz López, 2016; Brown and Rivas, 2011).

Key words: intransitivity, unaccusativity, adverbs, Caribbean Spanish, word order

 

34
Garcia, Christina; Saint Louis University; Abby Walker, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University Mary Beaton, Denison University
Puerto Rican social perception of /s/ aspiration: Comparing mainlander and islander
evaluations
Previous comparisons of /s/ production among Puerto Ricans residing on the island and in
the mainland United States show mixed results. Poplack (1980) and Ramos Pellicia (2012) find
lower rates of coda /s/ deletion among Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia and Lorain, Ohio,
respectively, than on the island, while Ghosh-Johnson’s (2005) Puerto Rican participants in
Chicago mirror islander /s/ production. O’Rourke and Potowski (2016) and Erker and Reffell (in
press) find that while rates of /s/ reduction differ by generation in Puerto Ricans in Chicago and
Caribbeans in NYC and Boston, respectively, generation is not a significant predictor of /s/
production, concluding that sociolinguistic norms are maintained. The question turns to what
impact residing in the mainland United States may have on perception. Here we examine whether
sociolinguistic evaluations are maintained by comparing the social perception of /s/ aspiration of
mainlander and islander Puerto Ricans.
We recorded 4 Puerto Rican males in a map task designed to elicit /s/ in pre- consonantal
environments (e.g. hospital). For each speaker, an excerpt that contained 3 pre-
consonantal /s/ was extracted, and 8 versions of the utterance were created with different
combinations of [s] or [h] realizations: in one version all /s/ tokens were produced as [s], in one
version all /s/ tokens were produced as [h], and the other six versions had different combinations
of words with [s] and [h] (three versions with two [s], three with one [s]). In this way we could
investigate listener sensitivity to additive productions of [s]. These stimuli were put in an
experiment online in which Puerto Rican participants were asked to rate the speaker’s age, social
class, education, masculinity, confidence, and simpatía. A given participant only heard 2/8
versions for each speaker.
Data collection is ongoing, but we have done an initial analysis of data from 92
participants, (45 Puerto Rico residents; 47 mainland US residents). Responses from mainland
residents are unchanged by the number of [s] or [h] in an utterance: they rate the speakers as
equally confident, educated, etc., regardless of guise. For Puerto Rico residents, as the number of
[s] realizations in an utterance increase, they perceive the speaker as more educated, of a higher
social class, and more confident. For class and education ratings, the effects of [s] seem
incremental: each additional [s] pushes ratings higher. For confidence ratings, the effect is driven
by a change in perception when all 3 /s/ are realized as [s], compared to versions with any [h]
realizations (i.e., 0-2 [s]).
The additive effects confirm that sociolinguistic meaning is not applied unilaterally to any
speaker that uses a particular variant, but rather that listeners are sensitive to the frequency of
variants in their evaluations (Labov et al. 2011). Furthermore, although previous production
studies largely suggest sociolinguistic patterns in /s/ realization are shared between mainlander and
islander speakers, this study suggests that the social evaluations of /s/ variants may not be. This
 may be because of the mainlanders’ prolonged contact with different varieties of Spanish.

35
Garre Leon, Victor, University of Texas at Austin
Intersubjectivity in heritage-native speaker interactions: Examining pragmatic resources
and expectations in intercultural dialogue
This study explores the notion of intersubjectivity in terms of how heritage speakers (HS)
and native speakers (NS) of Spanish reach common ground in interaction. Drawing on Young’s
(2009, 2019) interactional competence (IC) framework, which conceives meaning as co-
constructed between participants and analyzes how linguistic, interactional, and identity resources
are deployed, the interactions between three HS and NS dyads during two videotaped
conversations were examined. An immediate retrospective interview between the interactions
provided an analysis of the participants’ perceptions about the conversation considering both emic
and etic perspectives (Koike & Blyth 2016; Woodfield 2012). Considering this framework, we
examined:
(1) verbal and non-verbal resources employed between both participants;
(2) whether there are communication difficulties, and how they are resolved; and
(3) how participants draw on background knowledge to reach common ground.

A qualitative analysis of all six interactions between the three dyads (approx. two hours) was
carried out using conversation-analytic tools (Schegloff 2007) and interpreted based on Young’s
(2009, 2019) framework of IC in achieving intersubjectivity. Results show that these learners’
pragmatic and interactional competence resources reveal important changes in participation
framework and the use of pragmatic resources for linguistic and affective purposes, showing
differences in turn allocation, alignment activity, and the use of repair strategies. Previously
applied to L2 learners only, the project calls for the need to develop a framework of IC to account
for the complexity of interactions with bi-cultural people.

References (selected)
Atkinson, D. (Ed.) (2011). Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition.
London/New York: Routledge.
Atkinson, J. M., & Heritage, J. (Eds.) (1984). Structures of social action: Studies in conversation
analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Koike, D. (2014). Perspectives on Spanish Second Language
Acquisition from Pragmatics and Discourse. In M. Lacorte (Ed.), The Routledge
Handbook of Hispanic Applied Linguistics (pp. 25-48). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Kasper, G., & Wagner, J. (2011). A conversation-analytic approach to Second Language
Acquisition. In D. Atkinson (Ed.), Alternative Approaches to Second Language
Acquisition (pp. 117-142). London/New York: Routledge.
Koike, D. A. (2012). Variation in NS-learner interactions: Frames and expectations in pragmatic
co-construction. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.), Pragmatic Variation in
First and Second Language Contexts: Methodological Issues (pp. 175- 208). Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Koike, D. A. (2015). Changing frames in native speaker and learner talk: Moving toward a
shared dialogue. In D. A. Koike & C. S. Blyth (Eds.), Dialogue in Multilingual and
Multimodal Communities (pp. 253-285). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Koike, D. A., & Blyth, C. S. (2016). A metadialogic approach to intercultural dialogue:
Uncovering hidden motivations. Language and Dialogue, 6(2), 223-253.
Mori, J., & Nguyen, H. t. (2019). Conversation analysis in L2 pragmatics research. In N. Taguchi
36
 (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics (pp.
226-240). London/New York: Routledge.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis
(Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taguchi, N. (2017). Interactional pragmatics. In A. Barron, Y. Gu, G. Steen, & Y. Gu (Eds.),
The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 355-416). London/New York: Routledge.
Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second Language Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Woodfield, H. (2012). Pragmatic variation in learner perception: The role of retrospective verbal
report in L2 speech act research. In J. C. Félix-Brasdefer & D. A. Koike (Eds.),
Pragmatic Variation in First and Second Language Contexts: Methodological Issues (pp.
209-237). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Young, R. (2008). Language and interaction: An advanced resource book. London/New York:
Routledge.
Young, R. (2009). Discursive practice in language learning and teaching. Chichester, UK:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Young, R. (2011). Interactional competence in language learning, teaching, and testing. In
E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language learning and teaching
(Vol. 2, pp. 426-443). London/New York: Routledge.
Young, R. (2019). Interactional competence and L2 pragmatics. In N. Ishihara (Ed.), The
Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics (pp. 93-110).
London/New York: Routledge.
 

37
 George, Angela, University of Calgary
“Pushed me out of my comfort zone”: Effects of virtual exchanges on level of
comfort/anxiety among learners of Spanish
The present study investigates the effectiveness of virtual conversations in the
advanced-level university Spanish class by studying level of comfort/anxiety speaking the
Spanish. Previous studies on L2 adult Spanish experiential learning have included the use of
virtual exchanges to engage learners in speaking (Moreno-Lopez, Ramos-Sellman, Miranda-
Aldaco, & Gomis Quinto, 2017). Though this resulted in increased skills, the only reported
qualitative data on the subject has involved measuring a reduction of anxiety when speaking
the L2 (Moreno-Lopez et al., 2017). According to Mejía (2014), language anxiety remains
primarily the scope of studies on beginning learners, leaving out those more advanced, with
few exceptions. For example, Marcos-Llinás and Garau (2009) found advanced learners
exhibited more anxiety than those belonging to beginner or intermediate categories whereas
Tallon (2009) established that Spanish heritage learners (SHLs) exhibited lower anxiety than
their second language learner (L2L) counterparts, though they did not examine anxiety
specifically around speaking. The present study fills a much-needed gap by examining L2L
and SHL participants’ levels of anxiety via responses to Likert-scale statements and open-
ended written reflections
The participants in the current study, 8 adult L2L and 11 adult SHLs enrolled in an
advanced Spanish conversation and grammar course, conversed virtually via Zoom with 2-3
other L2Ls and SHLs in two geographically distinct communities in North America.
Participants completed a questionnaire before and after the two 45-minute recorded conversations
and a written reflection after both virtual conversations. The questionnaire, based on Pellettieri
(2011), involved indicating the level of comfort speaking with various people (classmates,
professors, L1 Spanish speakers) on a scale of 1 (extremely nervous) to 6 (extremely comfortable)
and the reflection involved responding to open-ended prompts about the skills practiced and
knowledge gained.
The results demonstrate that in general, L2Ls reported more anxiety surrounding speaking
than SHLs. Neither group exhibited much change over time, however this varied by individual
students, with more L2Ls increasing their comfort level than SHLs. Ultimately, this research
demonstrates that activities designed to engage students in conversations with other students do
not always result in decreased anxiety, particularly for L2Ls, many of whom expressed levels of
discomfort prior to engaging in the virtual exchanges. Possible reasons for this, such as
proficiency level and previous experience with Spanish, will be discussed. On the other hand,
SHLs expressed very little anxiety, with a few noting how this pushed them out of their comfort
zone, and several mentioned the added benefits of learning more about Spanish in the USA and
immigration issues. The students’ written reflections showed differences among L2Ls and SHLs
in metalinguistic awareness, cultural knowledge and attitudes towards leaning Spanish.
Implications for teaching and learning, which include pairing L2Ls and SHLs together as
well as the benefits of using virtual exchanges for certain populations of
participants will also be discussed.

Works cited

Marcos-Llinás, M., & Garau, M. (2009). Effects of Language Anxiety on Three Proficiency-
Level Courses of Spanish as a Foreign Language. Foreign Language Annals, 42(1), 94- 111.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2009.01010.x
Mejía, G. (2014). A Case Study of Anxiety in the Spanish Classroom in Australia. Journal of
38
University Teaching and Learning Practice, 11(3), 15.
Moreno-López, I., Ramos-Sellman, A., Miranda-Aldaco, C.,& Gomis Quinto, M.(2017).
Transforming Ways of Enhancing Foreign Language Acquisition in the Spanish Classroom:
Experiential Learning Approaches. Foreign Language Annals, 50(2), 398- 409.
https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12267
Pellettieri, J. (2011). Measuring Language-related Outcomes of Community-based Learning in
Intermediate Spanish Courses. Hispania, 94(2), 285-302. https://10.1353/hpn.2011.0041
Tallon, M. (2009). Foreign Language Anxiety and Heritage Students of Spanish: A Quantitative
Study. Foreign Language Annals, 42(1), 112-137. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-
9720.2009.01011.x
  

39
 Goulart, Larissa; Northern Arizona University
Formulaicity in Portuguese as a Second Language Writing: a structural and functional
analysis of lexical bundles across levels of proficiency.
 This study sought to investigate the structure and function of lexical bundles across levels
of Portuguese learners. Formulaic sequences are known to be an important resource in learners’
language development (Adel & Erman, 2012; Chen & Baker, 2010). Studies investigating
English as a Second Language have thoroughly addressed the use of formulaic sequences across
learners’ development level, suggesting that more advanced learners use more types of formulaic
sequences - that is, advanced learners know more forms of formulaic sequences - while lower
level learners use more formulas overall. Nevertheless, in Portuguese few studies have
investigated the use of formulaic sequences. Sardinha, Teixeira & Ferreira (2014) examined the
use of lexical bundles in a corpus of general texts written in Portuguese and Ferreira (2014)
examined the use of lexical bundles in textbooks of Portuguese as a Second Language (PSL).
These studies contribute to our understanding of language patterns Portuguese learners will
encounter in their study, but they do not describe the language patterns encountered in learner
language. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate the use of lexical bundles across
proficiency levels, providing an account of their structural classification and functional use in a
learner corpus. In order to achieve this goal, this study examined the use of lexical bundles in
texts written for PSL classes at five proficiency levels, from beginners (A1) to advanced (C1) as
defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The students
represented in the corpus used for this study come from diverse language backgrounds, e.g.
Chinese, English, Arabic, etc who were taking PSL classes in Portugal and East Timor.
Sequences of three words were extracted from the corpus using Antconc. These sequences had to
occur at a minimum dispersion of 5% in each subcorpora. The
results suggest that lower level learners rely more on lexical bundles that make reference to
people and places as a response to the writing prompts and that more advanced learners use
fewer lexical bundles overall. The results of this study help describe the language development in
Portuguese learners. The structural and functional patterns extracted can help inform the
 development of teaching materials for learners of PSL.

40
Haddad, Zoe & Valerie Freeman, Oklahoma State University
Oklahoma voices in the workplace: Effects of Southern features on employability
This study investigated the likely effects of two Southern speech features, the
socially- salient /aɪ/-monophthongization and the largely unnoticed pin-pen merger, on the
employability of young Oklahomans. Oklahoma is on the periphery of the South, and its
speakers employ both Midland and Southern features, including widespread pin-pen
merger and some /aɪ/- monophthongization, but little Southern Shift. Many Oklahomans
do not consider the state Southern, and they express the same attitudes about Southern
speech that have been reported across the country in other work (e.g., friendly but
uneducated). Consequently, we hypothesized that Oklahomans entering the workforce
who use Southern features could be negatively stereotyped and their employment
opportunities limited as a result.
Participants were 7 managers (4 male, 3 female, ages 20s-40s) who had lived in
Oklahoma for at least 12 years. Three grew up in Oklahoma, three in neighboring Texas, Kansas,
or Colorado, and one in Connecticut. They listened to recordings of 5 local college- aged female
“job applicants” who each read different sentences; managers rated each speaker on semantic
differential scales relevant to employability and attitudes about Southernness (e.g., friendly,
hard-working, intelligent, refined, good communicator). Each speaker was coached to produce
one feature of interest: monophthongal or diphthongal /aɪ/, merged or separate pin-pen, plus one
filler with no distinctive regional features. Speakers and features were counterbalanced across
listeners in two sets (e.g., half the managers heard Speaker A with pin-pen merger; half heard her
with separate pin/pen). Managers also read a wordlist, passage, and minimal-pairs list, completed
a short lexical identification task of isolated pin/pen words, and answered discussion questions
about Oklahoman speech and their perceptions of Southern features.
No managers produced monophthongal /aɪ/ themselves, though three used pin-pen
merger (two Oklahomans, one Kansan). All but the youngest merged Oklahoman correctly
identified all pin/pen words in the lexical identification task, suggesting that the spectrally
merged classes were distinguishable by other features.
Managers indicated a clear preference for “applicants” with diphthongal /aɪ/, rating them
higher than the monophthongal voice on most traits and highest on communication skills,
urbanness, and ability to fit in at their business. The pin-pen merger produced unclear results in
regard to preference, with neither speaker scoring above the median on any trait.
Managers’ discussion comments revealed associations between Southern speech and
reduced “efficiency” due to characterizations like “slow rate” and “drawl.” They also considered
Oklahoma more culturally Southern than Midwestern, and their characterizations of Oklahoman
speech mentioned descriptors typical of Southern speech, like “y’all, twang, drawl, slow, lazy,
mushy, stretched out vowels,” and /aɪ/-monophthongization – except for the manger from
Connecticut, who characterized Oklahoman speech as a mix of Midwestern and Southern.
Overall, it seems likely that monophthongal /aɪ/ is a particularly salient Southern speech
feature which is likely to impact employer perceptions of potential candidates and negatively
affect the employability of young Oklahomans. Due to the inconclusive nature of the responses
 to the pin-pen merger, it seems less likely to have an impact on employability.

41
Hama, Yoko, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
La adquisición, ehh, de muletillas en L2 español: Frequency and variety of filler words in
L2 Spanish of advanced learners
The current study examines the development of the use of fillers (muletillas) in the
speech of advanced learners of Spanish who are native speakers of English. Fillers, when used
appropriately and strategically, can be beneficial for efficient communication, supporting the
listener as they sort out speech and ignore misleading information for instance (Brennan and
Schober 2001). The benefits of fillers are significant not only in native languages but also in
second languages, yet fillers have been generally disregarded in the field of SLA and instructions
(Basurto Santos et al. 2016; Arenas Núñez 2012). The current study focuses on the expletive
fillers, which include clicks (Pinto 2019) and interjections, used by participants to fill pauses that
result from hesitation or word-search, and avoid silence that could interrupt the flow of
enunciation (Christl 1996). I analyze recorded conversations by advanced learners as well as
native speakers and compare the frequency of fillers, their variety, and L1 transfer. The results
suggest that advanced learners use fillers twice as often as native speakers, suggesting that their
speech is not as fluent as native speakers. In terms of the variety of fillers, advanced learners
relied heavily on one type of filler, especially a combination of a vowel and nasalization (such as
um), while native speakers employed a broader repertoire of fillers (e.g. simple vowels (/e/),
filler word (‘pues’), and clicks). There was no lexical L1 transfer in terms of fillers in speech of
the learners, indicating that they are conscious of the difference between Spanish and English
filler words. This study on subtle patterns in spontaneous daily speech contributes to the finer
differentiation and categorization of learners who all belong to an advanced group.

Keywords. fillers; second language acquisition; Spanish

References
Arenas Núñez, Alba María. 2012. La enseñanza de las muletillas en la clase de ELE.
Salamanca, Spain: Universidad de Salamanca trabajo final de máster.
Basurto Santos, Nora M.; María Magdalena Hernández Alárcon; and Irasema Mora Pablo. 2016.
Fillers and the development of oral strategic competence in foreign language
learning.Porta Linguarum 25.191-201.
Brennan, Susan E., and Michael F. Schober. 2001. How listeners compensate for disfluencies in
spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory and Language 44.274-296.
Christl, Joachim. 1996. Muletillas en el español hablado. El español hablado y la cultura oral en
España e Hispanoamérica, ed. by Thomas Kotschi; Wulf Oesterreicher; and Klaus
Zimmermann, 117-146. Madrid, Spain: Iberoamericana Vervuert.
Pinto, Derrin, and Donny Vigil. 2019. Searches and Clicks in Peninsular Spanish. Pragmatics
 29.83-105.

42
Hetrovicz, Lauren, Northwestern University
The Effects of NNS-NNS and NNS-NS Telecollaborative Interaction on the
Development of Second Language Confidence
Second language confidence (L2C), as defined by Clément (1980), is a lack of anxiety
when speaking in the second language and high ratings of self-proficiency; it is also influenced
by both the frequency of contact with speakers of target language and quality or pleasantness of
these encounters. L2C is considered a central component in second language learning as it can
that can affect the outcome and process of SLA and motivation (Dörnyei, 2005). Adding to
Clément’s (1980) work, Sampasivam and Clément (2014) have, more recently, proposed a
functional model of the two determinants that build towards L2C: self-involvement and richness
of the contact experience. Richness is defined as second language input that is varied, offers an
abundance of language forms, and allows for feedback. Self-involvement constitutes
communicative engagement and interactivity.
Within their framework, Clément and Sampasivam (2014) claim that computer mediated
communication is high in both richness and self-involvement, and, thus, is expected to lead to
increased L2C. While various studies have examined the factors that hinder or promote the
development of L2C (e.g., Tudini, 2003; Ortega, 2008; Jauregi & Bañados, 2008; Vurdien,
2019), this study adds to the literature by examining, for the first time, the role of mode of
interaction and interlocutor type, that is, online synchronous interaction with a peer on Zoom and
with a native speaker on Talk Abroad, on the emergence of L2C.
This investigation is guided by the following research questions: (1) Does
telecollaborative interaction with a peer non-native speaker on Zoom and/or with a native
speaker on Talk Abroad contribute to the development of L2C? (2) Are there differences in the
perception of interlocutor type in telecollaborative interaction (i.e., a peer non-native speaker on
Zoom vs. a native speaker on Talk Abroad) in terms of (a) richness and (b) self-involvement of
the language contact?
The participants (N= 30) were students enrolled in a fifth-semester Spanish conversation
course at a large, public U.S. university. Using a counter-balanced design, they completed one
30-minute conversation with a peer on Zoom and one 30-minute conversation with a native
speaker on TalkAbroad. In addition to the conversations, data also comes from the participants’
responses to an initial second language confidence questionnaire and two post-conversation
questionnaires adapted from Park & Lee (2006) and Espinosa (2007).
A series of two-tailed paired samples t-tests, using a pre-posttest design, were conducted
to determine the extent to which each type of interaction led to changes in L2C. The findings
revealed that telecollaborative interaction with both interlocutor types yielded a significant
increase in L2C. Regarding the two dimensions of the integrated model proposed by Clément
and Sampasivam (2014), namely, richness and self-involvement, the results showed no significant
differences between the richness of the Zoom and Talk Abroad interactions, but significant
differences were found for self-involvement. More specifically, at the group-level the participants
expressed in the quantitative and qualitative data that the Talk Abroad conversation with a native
speaker was more useful and prompted more engagement on their part than the peer-to-peer
Zoom conversation.

References

Clément, R. (1980). Ethnicity, contact and communicative competence in a second language. In

H. M. Giles, W. P. Robinson, & P. M. Smith (Eds.), Language: Social psychological
perspectives (pp. 147-154). Oxford: Permagon.
43
Dörnyei, Z. (2005). The psychology of the language learner: Individual differences in second
language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Espinosa, R. (2007). The Role of Motivational and Attitudinal Variables in Second Language
Acquisition. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Northern Illinois University, USA.
Jauregi, K., & Bañados, E. (2008). Virtual interaction through video-web communication: A step
towards enriching and internationalizing language learning programs. ReCALL, 20(2),
183-207.
Ortega, L. (2008). Interaction and attention to form in L2 text-based computer-mediated
communication. In A. Mackey & C. Polio (Eds.), Multiple perspectives on interaction (pp.
226-253), New York, NY: Routledge.
Park, H., & Lee, A. (2006). L2 Learners’ Anxiety, Self-Confidence, and Oral Performance.
Kunsan National University, Concordia University.
Sampasivam, S., & Clément, R. (2014). The dynamics of second language confidence: Contact
and interaction. In S. Mercer, & M. Williams (Eds.), Multiple perspectives on the self in
SLA (pp. 23-40). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Tudini, V. (2003). Using Native Speakers in Chat. Language Learning & Technology, 7(3), 141-
159.
Vurdien, R. (2019). Videoconferencing: Developing Students’ Communicative
Competence. Journal of Foreign Language Education and Technology, 4(2).

44
 Holguin Mendoza, Claudia, University of California, Riverside
Analisa Taylor, University of Oregon
Too Latinx or Not Latinx Enough?Latinx Narratives of Racial Identity and Belonging in a
Predominantly White University
This study examines how Latina students attending a predominantly white university in
the Pacific Northwest perceive their academic and social experiences in relation to the racially-
charged interactions they have had in and outside of the classroom. The rhetorical strategies
these students use to authenticate or lay claim to their Latinx identities diverge strongly in
accordance with whether they identify as people of color or as white or white-passing. Those
who identify as students of color emphasize how their phenotypic characteristics and Spanish
language use mark them as conspicuously Latinx and hence, as targets of racial discrimination.
In contrast, the Latina students who identify as white or white-passing emphasize their Spanish
language use and cultural practices as the most salient markers of their Latinx identities.
Insofar as they report feelings of exclusion, it is not from within the predominantly white
institution, but rather, from other Latinx students whom they perceive as invalidating their
claims of authenticity and judging them “not Latinx enough.”
These student narratives underscore the ways in which outward appearance and
sociocultural linguistic practices persists as central signifiers of racial hierarchies, even as they
contradict the many complexities that characterize the cultural and performative aspects of
Latinx identities. Critical Race Theory (Bonilla-Silva 2013, 2015; Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva
2008), and Raciolinguistics (Rosa & Flores 2017; Rosa 2016) give us a framework for
understanding the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race.
Specifically, they allow us to see how these students’ narratives reveal the complexity of their
own racial subjectivities and peer relationships as they negotiate the tacit or invisible
privileges to which some have access and some don’t within the white-non-white binary that
undergirds systemic racism in the U.S. Divergent as these students’ discursive strategies for
claiming their identities may be, each relies upon some form of essentializing racial
normativity. These sociolinguistic strategies come to matter for us when we consider how
students judge themselves and others as belonging or not belonging —as too Latinx or not
Latinx enough—, within the heterogeneous and culturally complex territory to which we refer
when we speak of the Latinx community.
These findings open a conversation on a taboo subject, largely invisible within the
wider predominantly white, Latinx-homogenizing institution: how simultaneous claims to
Latinx belonging and white privilege play into systemic racism and internal divisions among
Latinx groups on campus and throughout the U.S. At the very least, they reveal a need to
deepen our critical reflections on how we construct our own racial and ethnic identities in
relation to hegemonic whiteness, and to articulate how we might lay claim to them without
essentializing or claiming them through a tacit defamation of those for whom claiming or not
claiming is not a choice, namely, Latinx students of color. Becoming aware of the divergent
affective stances through which Latinx students authenticate their identities—as well as how
these stances reflect the unequal distribution of the invisible privileges of whiteness—can be a
first step in creating a more equitable and inclusive university culture.

Keywords: Raciolinguistics, Latinx, Whiteness, Authenticity, Higher Education.

45
 Bibliography

Bonilla-Silva, E. 2013. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the

Persistence of Racial Inequality in America.
Bonilla-Silva, E. 2015. More than Prejudice: Restatement, Reflections, and New
Directions in Critical Race Theory. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1):
73-87.
Rosa, J. D. 2016. “Standardization, Racialization, Languagelessness: Raciolinguistic
Ideologies across Communicative Contexts.” Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 26: 162- 183.
Rosa, J. D. & Flores, N. 2017. Unsettling race and language: Toward a
raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46: 621–647.
Shenk, P. S. 2007. “I’m Mexican, Remember? Constructing Ethnic Identities via
Authenticating Discourse.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(2): 194–220.Zuberi,
T., & Bonilla-Silva, E. 2008. White logic, white methods : racism and
methodology.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD. Available from: ProQuest Ebook
Central. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

46
Holt, Johanna, Consejo de Formación en Educación (CFE), Administración
Nacional de Educación Pública (ANEP), Uruguay & Talia Bugel, Purdue University
¿Qué te leo cuando te leo? : las actitudes lingüísticas de los lectores frente al tuteo y el
voseo en la literatura infantil uruguaya contemporánea
Within the framework of sociolinguistics we studied the language attitudes of teacher
and non-teacher readers toward the forms of address of the second person singular used in
Uruguayan children’s literature geared to pre-K and kindergarten students. Uruguayan Spanish
has four second person singular forms of address currently in use that mark
familiarity/closeness and region. Sociodemographic and language use data were collected
about the readers during reading sessions in class and in interviews with the readers following
the reading sessions. All modifications to second person singular forms of address were
recorded as indicating implicit attitudes, an original methodology that gave us access to
observable behaviors. The observation of behaviors was complemented by open and closed
questions that revealed explicit attitudes toward tuteo and voseo in exchanges with students
and throughout different social contexts in the city of Maldonado, Uruguay. With respect to
implicit attitudes, the information regarding occupation and self-identification as a user of
voseo or of tuteo surfaced as the variables playing the largest role: in the reading sessions,
teachers made more changes, and these were toward voseo. Regarding explicit attitudes, we
found a mismatch with usage that reveals linguistic insecurity.

Keywords: forms of address; Spanish in Uruguay; linguistic insecurity; language attitudes

methodology; reading aloud
 

47
Huback, Ana Paula, Columbia University
Reduction of the preposition para ‘to, for’ in Brazilian Portuguese
This study fits within the scope of linguistic variation with an emphasis in phonetics and
how frequency effects affect language variation. This paper investigates the reduction of the
preposition para ‘to, for’ in Brazilian Portuguese. In spoken language and some informal
written contexts, para is often used as pra. Corpora analysis shows that the first time pra was
registered in written Portuguese was in the 1400s, which indicates that this form has been in the
language for a long time. Another aspect of this reduction of para is that pra (the already
reduced form) is often contracted with the following definite or indefinite article in either
gender (feminine or masculine) or number (singular or plural). Examples of these cases are: pra
o (‘to, for the’ (definite article, masculine, singular) is reduced to pro, pra uma (‘to, for a’
(indefinite article, feminine, singular) is reduced to pruma. Corpora analysis shows that most of
these reduced forms started being used in the 1800s and 1900s. Although the reduction of para
to pra is widespread in the language, it does not affect every occurrence of para. By analyzing
data from over seven million spoken words, we observed that the reduction is more frequent in
certain expressions, such as para ela ‘to/for her’ (81%), para minha ‘to/for my/mine’ (77%),
para frente ‘forward’ (75%), para casa ‘to home’ (74%). As para or pra are often followed by
these words, it is argued that the frequency of the multiword sequence is one of the factors that
determines which occurrences of para will be used as pra. This paper offers evidence that this
reduction can in fact be explained due to the frequency of co-occurrence of para and the
following word. The concepts of string frequency (Krug 1998) and relative frequency (Torres
Cacoullos 2006) were tested. The results showed that relative frequency was the most important
factor that determined the reduction of para to pra. For our study, relative frequency was
defined as the sum of (pra + following word) divided by the number of times in which para (in
both reduced and unreduced forms) occur with the following word (Torres Cacoullos, 2006).
String frequency also played an important role in this reduction, although it was not as
determinant as relative frequency. String frequency was the sum of (para + following word) +
(pra + following word) divided by the number of the words in the corpus. The analysis
suggests that speakers store multiple clouds of exemplars for the same word (or strings of
words), and that detailed information is lexically stored along with individual words. The role
of repetition in the overlapping and deletion of segments is also observed in this case. Finally,
it is argued that whole words or frequently used expressions can be the units of lexical storage,
and this is why frequency effects can build up and affect word production and language
change.
 

48
Hur, Esther, Rutgers University Julio Cesar Lopez Otero, Rutgers University
Eunji Lee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Heritage language attitudes and maintenance: a comparison between Korean and Spanish
Spanish and Korean are two of the widely studied heritage languages (HL) across
American universities (Carreira & Kagan, 2011). Heritage language attitudes have been
found to have an effect in their maintenance (Cho, 2015; Gardner, 1985; Silva-Corvalan,
1994; Sanchez, Mayer, Camacho, & Rodriguez Alzza, 2018). This study explores the role of
exposure to reading as a factor in determining how adult heritage speakers (HSs) maintain
their HL through reading. A 50-question online survey was administered to 65 adult HSs (35
Korean HSs and 30 Spanish HSs) who were attending college at the time (age M = 22.3; SD
= 3.1) in order to answer these research questions:
Do adult HSs read more in their HL as a result of being exposed to their parents
reading to them in their HL during their childhood?
Are there differences between HSs of Spanish and HSs of Korean?
Our survey found that, in spite of both groups reporting similar patterns of exposure to
reading materials during childhood, Spanish HSs read more in their HL (Gharibi & Boers,
2017; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007) than their Korean- speaking counterparts, contrary to Au and
Oh (2005) (Table 1). We argue that this contrast stems from the difference in the writing
systems of their HLs. This contrast is reinforced by the students’ motivations to maintain
their HL: while Spanish HSs reported using their HL for professional opportunities, Korean
HSs preferred using their HL with friends, family, and for entertainment purposes instead
(Table 2). On the other hand, both groups have similar reading habits in their dominant
language: 33/35 (94.29%) of Korean HSs reported reading in English over one hour a week
vs 25/30 (83.33%) of Spanish HSs.

References
Au, T., & Oh, J.(2005). Korean as a heritage language. In L. Ping (Ed.), Handbook of East
Asian psychology (pp. 268– 275). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Carreira, M., & Kagan, O. (2011). The results of the National Heritage Language Survey:
Implications for teaching, curriculum design, and professional development.
Foreign language annals, 44(1), 40-64.
Cho, G. (2015). Perspectives vs. Reality of Heritage Language Development: Voices
from Second-Generation Korean-American High School Students.
Multicultural Education, 22(2), 30-38.
Gardner, G.(1985). Social psychology and second language learning: The role of attitudes
and motivation. London: Edward Arnold.
Gharibi, K., & Boers, F. (2017b). Influential factors in lexical richness of young heritage
speakers’ family language: Iranians in New Zealand. InternationalJournal of
Bilingualism. Epub ahead of print23 September 2017.
Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O.(2007). Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom.
Language & Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368–395.
Sánchez, L., Mayer, E., Camacho, J., & Alzza, C. R. (2018). Linguistic attitudes toward
Shipibo in Cantagallo: Reshaping indigenous language and identity in an urban
setting. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(4), 466–487.
Silva-Corvalán, C. (1994). Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford
University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4314.
 

49
Jambrović, Samuel, University of Toronto
Eliminating presuppositions via the subjunctive: Evidence from DOM languages
In the literature, it remains an open question why DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT
MARKING (DOM) is cross-linguistically obligatory with animate indefinite quantifiers (i.e.
somebody) in intensional contexts but not with indefinite expressions like a person (Kelepir
2001, Leonetti 1999, López 2012, Rodríguez-Mondoñedo 2007, von Heusinger & Kornfilt
2005).
(1) a. Maria caută *(pe) cineva care să o poată ajuta.
(Romanian)
Maria search.3SG DOM somebody who SUBJ her can.3SG.SUBJ
help ‘Maria is looking for somebody who could help her.’
b. Maria caută (pe) o persoană care să (o) poată
ajuta. Maria search.3SG DOM a person who SUBJ her
can.3SG.SUBJ help ‘Maria is looking for a person who could
help her.’
(2) a. Hasan kendisine yardım ed-ebil-ecek bir-in-*(i) ar-ıyor.
(Turkish)
Hasan himself help do-able-FUT one-POSS-DOM seek-PROG
‘Hasan is looking for somebody who can help him.’ (Kelepir 2001:114)
b. Hasan kendisine yardım ed-ebil-ecek bir insan-(i)
ar-ıyor. Hasan himself help
do-able-FUT one human-DOM seek-PROG ‘Hasan is looking
for a (certain) person who can help him.’
Since somebody and a person are both animate and non-specific, any account based
solely on these features does not capture the behavior of DOM in 1-3. Instead, I argue that the
relevant factor is presupposition: somebody entails a referent, while a person does not (Mayer
2017). This proposal is supported by a morphological analysis of somebody in each language.
For example, Romanian cineva is cine ‘who’ + -va ‘some’, and Turkish biri is bir ‘one’ + -i
‘3SG.POSS’, both of which include a quantificational morpheme.
Further data complicate the issue, however. Unlike the case of Romanian, DOM is
optional with somebody in Persian and Spanish if the embedded verb is subjunctive (3b and
4b).
(3) a. Ye kas-i-*(ro) niyaaz daar-am ke se taa zaban sohbat mi-kon-e.
(Persian) a person-INDEF-DOM need have-1SG who three CL language
speech DUR-do-3SG
‘I need somebody who speaks three languages.’
b. Ye kas-i-(ro) niyaaz daar-am ke se taa zaban sohbat be-kon-e.
a person-INDEF-DOM need have-1SG who three CL language speech
SUBJ-do-3SG
‘I need somebody who speaks three languages.’
(4) a. Busco *(a) alguien que sabe tres idiomas.
(Spanish)
b. Busco (a) alguien que sepa tres idiomas. (Rodríguez-Mondoñedo 2007:204)

In these languages, it seems possible to eliminate the presupposition that is entailed by

somebody by means of the subjunctive. In Romanian, however, cineva contains a morpheme,
cine ‘who’, that also presupposes a referent (Dobrovie-Sorin 1990).
(5) *(Pe) cine cauți?
50
 DOM who search.2SG
‘Whom are you looking
for?’

The fact that cineva consists of two morphemes that independently presuppose referents
suggests that the subjunctive alone is not enough to eliminate the need for DOM. In other
words, it is not the semantics of cineva that is responsible for the obligatoriness of DOM in all
contexts but rather its morphological composition. To test this hypothesis, future work will
examine other languages with DOM to identify examples of somebody that are
morphologically complex and behave similarly to Romanian cineva.

REFERENCES
DOBROVIE-SORIN, CARMEN. 1990. Clitic doubling, wh-movement, and quantification
in Romanian. Linguistic Inquiry 21.351–397.
KELEPIR, MELTEM. 2001. Topics in Turkish syntax: Clausal structure and scope.
Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.
LEONETTI, MANUEL. 1999. El artículo. Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española,
ed. by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, 787–890. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
LÓPEZ, LUIS. 2012. Indefinite objects: Scrambling, choice functions, and differential
marking.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
MAYER, ELISABETH. 2017. Spanish clitics on the move: Variation in time and space.
Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
RODRÍGUEZ-MONDOÑEDO, MIGUEL. 2007. The syntax of objects: Agree and
differential object marking. Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut dissertation.
VON HEUSINGER, KLAUS, and JAKLIN KORNFILT. 2005. The case of the direct object
in Turkish: Semantics, syntax and morphology. Turkic Languages 9.3–44.

51
Hernández, Madeline, José Jiménez & Katherine Christoffersen, University of Texas Rio
Grande Valley
Digital Resources for the Public: Virtual Community Engagement and its Impact
While the digital humanities field is expansive (Spiro, 2011), fewer digital humanities
projects engage with the local community. Many scholars, however, have recently encouraged
a bridging of the gap between digital and public humanities (Cicere, 2011; Estes, 2012; Hager,
2013; Martin, Compton, & Hunt, 2017; Woodward, 2009). Along these lines, while many
digital community-based corpora exist (e.g., Corpus of Mexican Spanish in Salinas, Spanish in
Texas corpus, New Mexico and Colorado Spanish Corpus, Corpus del Español en el Sur de
Arizona), fewer digital corpora projects also inform the community through materials meant
for a broader audience. The Corpus Bilingüe del Valle. (Besset & Christoffersen 2019-) is a
corpus of sociolinguistic corpora in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Currently, most of
its content is aimed primarily at researchers. However, this study involved the creation of
digital resources for the public and the analysis of the impact these resources have on the
community. In short, this study seeks to examine: How do digital resources created for the
public impact access, visibility and understanding about the community’s linguistic resources?
The team first developed various digital resources, incorporated them on the CoBiVa
website, and distributed them throughout local media outlets. The resources include short
videos on Youtube dispelling myths about code-switching and distilling information from
research articles and presentations aimed at a more general public audience. Other digital
resources include social media accounts, including logos and virtual flyers. The team also
intermittently contacted local media outlets to further share the resources to the community.
Secondly, the research team tracked the impact of these resources through likes,
comments, and viewership, as well as the content of the media outreach materials. The study
will share preliminary findings on surveys and interviews with community members about
the resources.
This project serves as a template for how researchers may participate in virtual
community engagement. It also serves to demonstrate the importance of engaging the local
community on questions related to language use, such as informing the community about the
richness of local language varieties and practices.

52
  Kane, Aurora, University of California, Berkeley
The unmarked emerges: An OT analysis of paragoge in Traditional New Mexican
 
Spanish
Traditional New Mexican Spanish (TNMS) has a number of phonological phenomena
that differentiate it from other Spanish varieties, but one of the most unique and least analyzed
is paragoge. A vowel, [e] or [i], is epenthesized at the ends of utterance-final words ending in
certain consonants, resulting in forms like [ablaɾe] for /ablaɾ/ ‘to talk’ or [papeli] for /papel/
‘paper’. This talk presents an Optimality Theory analysis of this phenomenon (Prince &
Smolensky, 1993).
Bills & Vigil (2008) describe this paragoge as occurring utterance-finally after stressed
final syllables ending in an alveolar consonant ([l], [r], [s], or [n]); the paragogic vowel seems
to mostly realize as [e] but occasionally as [i]. Either vowel is possible even in phonologically
identical environments, as in /isabél/ → [isabéle] and /papél/ → [papéli].
Though both Bills & Vigil (2008) and Lipski (2008) have suggested that the
paragoge is an archaism from Latin and Old Spanish verb infinitives, the phenomenon
appears in words of any class, suggesting that the phenomenon is not morphological.
This OT analysis proposes a high-ranking constraint in TNMS called *FINALCOR,
which forbids stressed syllables ending in alveolar consonants from appearing phrase-finally.
Since none of the sounds in the input are ever altered to avoid the output disfavored by
*FINALCOR, faithfulness constraints IDENT-IO and MAX-IO are also high-ranked. A suite
of vowel quality constraints, *LOW, *BACK, *MID, and *HIGH, must be strictly dominated
by the IO constraints to ensure that the vowel quality is only important for the epenthetic
vowel. Also, since the paragogic vowel is never low or back but can be mid or high, *LOW
and *BACK are strictly ranked above *MID and *HIGH. The anti-epenthesis
faithfulness
constraint DEP-V is ranked below all of these, as in the tableau that will presented at the
talk.
Given the variation between [e] and [i] for identical phonological environments, *MID and

*HIGH are variably ranked with respect to each other; further data collection could shed
light on the probability of each vocalic realization and any extralinguistic factors that
influence this outcome.
A situation like this, in which some marked structure (here, two of four vowel
qualities) is generally allowed but forbidden in certain contexts, is referred to as “the
emergence of the unmarked” (McCarthy & Prince, 1994). In cases of epenthesis, the
epenthetic sound’s absence in the input renders it “invisible” to IO constraints (Becker &
Flack Potts, 2011). In this case, this means that the vowel quality constraints have little
influence over the part of the candidate that corresponds to the input, since any changes
there will incur violations of those higher- ranking constraints. As a result, only the
epenthetic vowel is truly subject to the markedness constraints that govern vowel quality,
even though the quality itself is variable. Therefore, TNMS presents an interesting variation
on the emergence of the unmarked that merits further study
References

Becker, M., & Flack Potts, K. (2011). The emergence of the unmarked. In M. van Oostendorp,
C. J. Ewen, E. V. Hume, & K. Rice (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology
(pp. 1363-1379). John Wiley & Sons.
53
Bills, G., & Vigil, N. (2008). The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern
Colorado: A linguistic atlas. University of New Mexico Press.
Lipski, J. M. (2008). Traditional varieties: New Mexico and Louisiana. In Varieties of Spanish
in the United States (pp. 191-222). Georgetown University Press.
McCarthy, J. J., & Prince A. S. (1994). The emergence of the unmarked: Optimality in
prosodic morphology. In M. Gonzalez (Ed.), Proceedings of the North East
Linguistic Society 24 (pp. 333-379). Graduate Linguistic Student Association.
University of Massachusetts.
Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. (1993). Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative
grammar. Technical Report CU-CS-696-93. Department of Computer Science,
University of Colorado at Boulder.

54
 Keaton, Ashley, University of California, Davis
 
Linguistic Variation in Nevada’s Spanish-Language Miranda Warnings
In the landmark case Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the United States Supreme Court
mandated that law enforcement agencies advise all suspects of their constitutional rights prior
to interrogation. This decision required law enforcement agencies nationwide to create various
scripts known as the Miranda warnings. Research demonstrates a great degree of variance
between Miranda warnings in the United States, and highlights how variation can impact
comprehensibility (Kurzon, 2000; Pavlenko, 2008; Rogers, Harrison, Shuman, Sewell, and
Hazelwood 2007; Rogers, Hazelwood, Sewell, Harrison, and Shuman 2008b; Shuy, 1997). In
recent years, research indicated that language barriers continue to be a large obstacle in
ensuring that the suspect understands their rights (Eades and Pavlenko, 2016). The present
study, therefore, seeks to answer the following questions: 1) is there a standard Miranda
warning in Nevada, 2) is there a Spanish standard translation of the Miranda warnings in
Nevada, and 3) are the Spanish translations of the Miranda warnings adequate to ensure
listener comprehension?
This study examines the written English and Spanish versions of the Miranda warnings
from five Nevada law enforcement agencies. Each Spanish version was compared to the
respective English version to ensure the content of the Miranda warnings was accurately
described and the translation was sufficiently clear. The data suggests there are certain repeated
problems with the Miranda warnings in Spanish across agencies. One frequent issue is the
omission of necessary subject pronouns and anaphoric references to direct and indirect object
pronouns, which are often left to be inferred by the listener without providing necessary
context. Several agencies in the study had verb conjugation issues, and frequently confused the
future tense and past subjunctive tense. In general, law enforcement agencies tend to use
unnecessarily complex syntax and lexicon when other more conversationally logical
equivalents are available.
The most significant issue with the Miranda warnings in this study is the assumption
by law enforcement agencies that detainees will have a baseline familiarity with their
Constitutional rights. Four out of five agencies in this study do not advise suspects that their
rights are continuing, and nothing in the language of the warnings would imply as much to
the listener.
Furthermore, many agencies truncated the full expression of the Miranda rights with
simpler phrases that do not explain the whole meaning of the right. Moreover, none of the
Miranda warnings in this study explain exactly how the detainee can invoke their rights, even
though it is evident that police officers expect detainees to use specific language to invoke
them (Ainsworth 2008; Ainsworth 2010; Mason 2013; Pavlenko 2008; Shuy 1997).
This study contextualizes the paramount importance of accurate Spanish translations
of the Miranda warnings in Nevada, where 21% of the community speaks Spanish (American
Community Survey, 2016). The results of this study indicate a need for improvement to the
Spanish Miranda warnings in Nevada, and suggest key areas that require specific revisions in
order to conform to case law and best practices based in research.

55
 Lenardon, Maria Laura & Cristina Percoco, Villanova University
Communicating with Native Speakers: Intermediate L2 Learners’ of Spanish Attitudes
Toward the Platform TalkAbroad
Two of the most important goals of foreign language programs are to increase
students’ language proficiency and cultural competency. TalkAbroad, provides L2 learners
with an opportunity to engage in 10 to 15-minute conversations with native speakers from
different Spanish-speaking countries as a way to advance these goals. Since these
conversations are computer mediated, some of the concerns of using TalkAbroad are related
to students’ attitudes towards the platform and their proficiency gains. In previous research,
Sama and Wu (2018) found that intermediate learners showed improvement in oral
proficiency. Also, in another study, advanced learners of Spanish reported lower anxiety to
converse in Spanish and being more confident about their foreign language skills after using
TalkAbroad (Lang-Rigal & Galarreta-Aima, 2019). Furthermore, the L2 learners of Spanish
in Warner Ault’s study (2020) made cultural awareness and proficiency gains. The purpose of
this study is to examine university students’ attitudes and perceptions towards TalkAbroad.
Data were collected using a questionnaire where students reflected on their experience with
this platform. In these reflections, students indicated what went well and what did not.
Participants consisted of 30 university learners enrolled in L2 intermediate of Spanish classes
at a private university in Pennsylvania. They completed four fifteen-minute conversations and
subsequent written reflections about each of the conversations as well as an end of the
semester questionnaire about TalkAbroad. Thematic analysis was used to examine the
reflections (Braun & Clarke 2006).The results reveal that most learners exhibited positive
attitudes towards TalkAbroad. Students report that TalkAbroad helped them become more
confident with their language skills, gain fluency and feel more comfortable with
conversational Spanish. They also claim to have improved their
overall language skills. These results are similar to those of other studies (Lang-Rigal &
Galarreta-Aima, 2019; Sama & Wu, 2018). Additionally, some students mentioned that they
became more familiar with L2 cultural differences and similarities as was reported in Warner
Ault (2020). However, it should be noted that students also provided negative feedback.
These comments for the most part, were related to technology issues, anxiety, accuracy (i.e.,
finding the right word to say or conjugating a verb correctly) or transitioning from one topic
to another, among others.

56
 Lewis, Tom; Tougaloo College
Boricuas in the Big Easy: Linguistic white privilege and language
choice
This paper presents an analysis of the impact of the sociolinguistic context on
language usage among Puerto Ricans in New Orleans, LA. In particular, I consider how
ideological articulations of Spanish in the community link to speaker’s linguistic choices.
I argue here that public space in New Orleans is articulated as Anglo space (Hill, 1998)
through a semiotic process rooted in localized articulations of the Latinx Threat Narrative
(Chavez, 2008).
Essentially, Spanish, or English with an accent perceived by the listener as ‘Spanish,’ is
monitored and socially sanctioned within the public sphere (Urciuoli, 1993). Unmarked
linguistic identities are restricted to Anglo speakers in a form of linguistic white privilege.
First- generation Puerto Rican relocators to the city consciously modify their linguistic
performance in efforts to avoid the social stigma attached to Spanish. Spanish attrition, seen
through this lens, is not an accidental by-product of language contact, but a result of
systematic linguistic and cultural oppression that restricts access to positive linguistic
identities to Anglo English speakers.
The analysis is based on in-depth discourse analysis of six (6) sociolinguistic
interviews conducted with Puerto Ricans in New Orleans in the spring of 2017 as part of a
larger project focused on language use, attitude, and ideology in the Latinx community in
New Orleans.
Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using the discourse analysis software Atlas
T.I. in order to track mentions of threat discourses and to track participant reactions to
these discourses. The interviews reveal that participants are acutely aware of threat-driven
discourses surrounding the Latinx community and moderate, both consciously and
unconsciously, their language use to mitigate the deleterious effects of these discourses.
New Orleans represents a fascinating linguistic context due to long term contact
between varieties of American English, French, Spanish, Native American languages, and
African languages. However, prior to a recent increase in attention, the city had been
understudied (Dajko et al, 2012). The past five-to-ten years has seen an increased amount of
academic attention to language use in the city (Eble, 2009; Schoux-Casey, 2013; Carmichael,
2014). This includes discussion of language use in the Latinx community by Lewis (2019).
This paper continues this conversation and thus represents part of an ongoing effort to study
language, identity, and ideology both in New Orleans generally and among New Orleans’
Latinx communities more specifically.

57
  Jiefang
Li & Yiwen Peng, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Testing Speech Learning Model through Investigating the Mandarin
Vowels produced by “Naïve” Mandarin Speakers
Based on the Speech Learning Model (SLM) (Flege,1995), speakers can have a better
performance at new vowel production because speakers would fail to distinguish the familiar
vowels in the target language from the vowels in their native language. In this study, we
hypothesized that there would be a significant difference between the vowel production of
naïve Mandarin speakers and native Mandarin speakers if naïve speakers found the vowel
similar to one of the tokens in their native language’s vowel inventory. In other words, naïve
speakers were expected to have a more standard pronunciation in new vowels rather than
familiar vowels.
The participants are eight English native speakers (four male adults and four female
adults) who have never learned Mandarin before. Target vowels are all monophthongs in
Mandarin Chinese: /i/, /y/, /u/, /ə/, /a/. During the perception test, participants listened to the
Mandarin monophthongs produced by native Mandarin speakers and then chose the most
similar English vowel (embedded in real English words with bold type) corresponding to the
Mandarin vowel they heard. In the production experiment, participants were asked to do an
elicited imitation of the target vowel after hearing the sound.
With the result of the perception test, the degree of similarity (DS) was calculated
demonstrating that the familiar vowels to the participants are /i/ and /u/, and new vowels are
/y/, /ə/, and /a/. We then initiated an accent rating of their vowel production scored by two
Mandarin native speakers on a scale of 1 to 10, revealing that the production /u/ (5.69) and
/y/ (5.91) was with the least non-native accent, and the one with the best phonetic accuracy
was the production of /a/ (6.91). Values of F1 and F2 for each production in Pratt were first
measured in Hz and the independent t-test was applied to identify the effect of language group
on the mean scores of F1 and F2. The only significant difference between English speakers
and Mandarin speakers was the pronunciation of /a/ of male participants. English male
speakers produced a more back /a/, which is closer to the English vowel /ɑ/ (Figure1 &
Figure2). Three additional quantitative measurements were implemented to determine how
similar/different between the vowels pronounced by English speakers and Mandarin speakers:
compact-diffuse (C-D), grave-acute (G-A), and the average Euclidean Distance (ED).
Similarly, a significant difference was found in the G-A value and C-D value associated with
/a/ between male English speakers and male Mandarin speakers. The averaged ED values
across the familiar vowels measured for both male and female groups were smaller than the
averaged ED values from new vowels.
According to the results of the perception test, /u/ was considered as a familiar vowel
for English speakers, while the results of the production rating demonstrated that the
speakers’ production of /u/ had the most salient foreign accent, which partially supported our
original hypothesis. However, the acoustic measurements (F1, F2, C-D, G-A, ED) indicated
that there was no significant difference between the vowel production of naïve Mandarin
speakers and native Mandarin speakers, no matter if the target vowel was new or familiar to
the naïve speakers. This phenomenon failed to support the original hypotheses or to validate
the theory of SLM. Nonetheless, the results did not suffice to refute the SLM prediction
either, since this model was intended to test second language acquisition.

58
Licata, Gabriella, University of California, Berkeley
  
Indexing Inauthenticity to Promote White Space: Conservative Media’s Criticisms of
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Linguistic Repertoire
It is no secret that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a.k.a. AOC), House Representative to
New York’s 14th district and self-proclaimed democratic socialist, is a political and cultural
phenomenon that has taken the nation by storm. Rep. AOC upset the left establishment in
2018 when she defeated the ten-term incumbent—Democrat Joe Crowley—with a grassroots
campaign. Since then, Rep. AOC has received attention at the national and global level by
creating a platform that appeals to young and progressive voters all over the country. With
this increasing popularity, she is both praised and scrutinized by the media and political
commentators, though the focus of the discourse varies greatly depending on the ideological
perspective. Conservative news channels all over the country report on Rep. AOC frequently,
discussing political issues (e.g. the Green New Deal) and personal issues alike (e.g. the price
of her haircut and clothing). Since assuming office, conservative pundits have honed in on
Rep.
AOC’s linguistic repertoire in interviews and campaign speeches, criticizing various
aspects of her accent and register. I take a critical discourse approach to understanding these
reproaches in the right-leaning media. To achieve this, I compiled a data corpus of online
news articles, interviews, and Tweets and examined the indexicalities that arise when
conservative pundits discuss Rep. AOC’s speech style, including her accent, codeswitching,
and self-identifications. I argue that by means of direct indexicality, conservative pundits
single out Rep. AOC’s linguistic forms in order to challenge her linguistic authenticity, thus
disparaging her credibility and sincerity as a politician. These direct indexicalities are then
considered within the scope of indirect indexicality in order to uncover the larger ideological
stances and logics of the conservative media. These same commentators, in ridiculing the
linguistic practices that index
AOC’s heritage, perpetuate an agenda of covert racism that espouses the praxis of
political discourse in a white public space (Hill, 1998), in essence indexing whiteness as
the ideal representation of politician and othering anyone that does not fit this normalized
model.

References

Hill, J. H. (1998). Language, race, and white public space. American anthropologist,
100(3), 680-689.

59
Lifszyc, Irina, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  ‘En el que’ vs. ‘En que’: The evolution of the omission of definite articles in propositional
relative clauses in rioplatense Spanish

Spanish allows for the production of relative clauses introduced by simple or complex
relative particles. Unlike simple relative particles (la niña que vive en esa casa
[the girl who lives in that house]), complex relative particles are formed by the definite article
and relative pronouns que or cual (la casa en la que vive la niña [the house in which
the girl lives]) and they could easily be replaced by a simple relative pronoun such as quien
(Real Academia Española (RAE), 2009). Complex relative particles combine with
prepositions to form a prepositional relative unit, which introduce prepositional relative
clauses:
(1) El bolígrafo con el que escribo todas mis cartas
[The-masc,sg pen with the-masc,sg that I write-1sg all-fem my-pl letters]
‘The pen with which I write all my letters’
(Brucart, 1992)

However, due to the interaction of different factors, such as the preposition in the clause,
the type of clause, the antecedent, and the syntactic structure of the sentence, sometimes the
article can be omitted, which results in:
(2a) Tengo un bolígrafo con el que puedes escribir.
[I have-1sg a-masc pen with the-masc,sg that you can-2sg write]
‘I have a pen with which you can write.’

(2b) Tengo un bolígrafo con que

puedes escribir. [I have-1sg
a-masc pen with that you (Balbachan, 2011)
can-2sg write] ‘I have a pen with
which you can write.’

This structure is common in other romance languages, such as Italian, in which the
relative pronoun cui must be used in relative clauses only after a preposition, but the definite
article is not present:
(3a) La bicicleta di cui ti ho parlato
[The-fem, sg bike about that you-dat have-1sg,pret speak- part.]
‘The bike about which I spoke to you’

60
 (3b) La professoressa con cui ho studiato l’italiano.
[The-fem professor-fem with whom have-1sg,pret. study-part the-masc Italian]
‘The professor with whom I studied Italian’
(Speroni & Golino, 1985)
While the structure in (2a) can occur with all prepositions and any antecedent,
there are several restrictions for clauses like (2b), and the use of the definite article is usually
the preferred option (Brucart, 1999). Despite the restrictions, the omission of the definite
article in propositional clauses is a frequent phenomenon in both Latin American and
Peninsular Spanish (Santana Marrero, 2004; Kempas, 2015).
This asymmetry has been studied in an attempt to predict its occurrence (Balbachan,
2011) and to account for its occurrence in different Spanish-speaking regions (Santana
Marrero, 2004; Kempas, 2015), but no study has analyzed the evolution of the phenomenon
throughout time. In particular, the Spanish spoken in the Rio de la Plata region in Argentina
(rioplatense Spanish) was in contact with Italian during the 19th and 20th centuries due to the
large influx of Italian migration (Klein & Seibert, 1981), and this migration had linguistic
consequences in the Spanish variety spoken in the area (Colantoni
& Gurlekian, 2004). In this study, I will assess 19th, 20th, and 21st century newspapers from the
Rio de la Plata region, mostly Buenos Aires and Rosario, Argentina, to analyze the changes this
phenomenon experienced over time and its relation to queísmo, which is the omission of the
preposition in ‘preposition + que constructions’:
(4a) El momento en el que te vi
[The-masc,sg moment in the-masc,sg that you-acc saw-
1sg,pret] ‘The moment in which I saw you’

(4b) El momento en que te vi

[The-masc,sg moment in that you-acc saw-
1sg,pret] ‘The moment in which I saw you’

(4c) El momento que te vi

[The-masc,sg moment that you-acc saw- 1sg,pret]
‘The moment that I saw you’

I will analyze 10 newspapers issues dated between 1825 and 2000, with approximately 10
years between each issue. I expect to find more instances of omission of the article in
prepositional relative units as I move forward in time, as well as more instances of queísmo,
since I believe the structure has been reduced over time, and nowadays we can find propositional
relative clauses introduced only by relative pronoun que.
References

Bosque, I., Demonte, V., Lázaro Carreter, F., Pavón Lucero, M. V., & Española, R.

A. (1999). Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Espasa.

Brucart, J. M. (1992). Some asymmetries in the functioning of relative pronouns in Spanish.

Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics, 2, 113-143.

Brucart, J. M. (1999). La estructura del sintagma nominal: las oraciones de relativo.

61
 In Ignacio Bosque y Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua
española (pp. 395-522). Espasa Calpe.
Colantoni, L., & Gurlekian, J. (2004). Convergence and intonation: historical evidence
from Buenos Aires Spanish. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 7(2), 107-
119.
Klein, H. S., and Seibert, S. (1981). La Integración de Inmigrantes Italianos en la Argentina y
los Estados Unidos: Un Análisis Comparativo. Desarrollo Económico, 21(81), 3-27.
Real Academia Española. (2009). Nueva gramática de la lengua española (Vol. 2). Espasa
Santana Marrero, J. (2004). Preposición+(artículo)+ que relativo: análisis en la norma
lingüística culta panhispánica. Boletín de Lingüística, 21, 66-91.

Speroni, C., & Golino, C. L. (1985). Basic Italian. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

62
López Valdez, Lydda, University of Miami
 
Mexican Latinx identity in South Florida: metalinguistics and the evaluation of rural
and popular variants

Linguists have argued that one of the greatest barriers for the continuity of Spanish in
the US is the low socio-economic institutional presence and value attached to Spanish (e.g.
Sánchez 1983). Sociolinguistic studies of US Mexican Spanish varieties have largely focused
on communities in the Southwest (e.g. Parodi, 2004) but also in the Midwest (e.g. Farr, 2006),
Texas (Gutierrez, 1995, 2001), North Carolina (Wolfram, Carter, and Moriello, 2004) etc.
where Spanish has had a long historical presence largely linked to rural and migrant
communities. Studies in California (Parodi, 2004; Guerrero 2018) argue that influences from
traditionally stereotyped varieties are preserved and repurposed in the construction of
contemporary Latinx identities. This project contributes to the body of literature on Mexican
Spanish varieties in the US by investigating how linguistic features acquire new meanings and
values within South Florida’s context of intensified mass migration and globalization. The
theoretical crux of the argument rests on findings in sociolinguistics that established linguistic
continuity/discontinuity of minority languages among generations of speakers as tied to issues
of prestige, identity formation, social network, linguistic ideology, etc. (Beaudrie & Fairclough,
2012; Potowski, 2012; Silva-Corvalán, 1994). The current paper presents an examination of the
use and evaluation of a set of linguistic features by both rural and urban Mexican heritage
speakers in South Florida. Metalinguistic commentary is analyzed to understand the
construction of positive Mexican Latinx identities within the South Florida context.
The data analyzed for this paper comes from a larger corpus of sociolinguistic
interviews and questionnaires conducted at the University of Miami in 2020. Methodologically,
this project presents data from 12 sociolinguistic interviews and questionnaires conducted via
Zoom with heritage speakers in Miami and Homestead, FL. Participants were asked questions
in relation to Spanish in South Florida, their variety of Spanish, and the use and perception of a
particular set of rural and popular variants popular in Mexican Spanish. The linguistic features
analyzed here were selected from Guerrero (2018)’s social recognition questionnaire. Ten non-
standard linguistic features were selected for their potential identity value: rural and popular
Spanish variants (e.g. comistes, haiga ) as well as colloquial lexemes (e.g. no más) and English
loanwords (e.g. pa’tras). Metalinguistic commentary about English and Spanish was culled
from the Zoom interviews. Detailed transcriptions were made for all interviews, and all
instances of metalinguistic commentary were extracted for analysis. All recurring discursive
tropes about English and Spanish were grouped and analyzed separately. Qualitative findings
are considered in light of ongoing perceptual and attitudinal studies using direct and indirect
methods in South Florida (Carter and Lynch 2013; Carter and Callesano 2014).
The ongoing analysis of metalinguistic commentary suggests that while many speakers
are aware of the value of Spanish in the local and national economy, their own linguistic
varieties seem to be undervalued within the discourse of the globalized economy. These
observations show that as linguistic features move across borders they take on new meanings in
the construction and performance of local Mexican identities within the globalized South
Florida context.

63
Martinez-Mira, Maria Isabel, University of Mary Washington
 
Análisis del “posicionamiento subjetivo” en la expresión de opiniones sobre inmigración
ilegal/discriminación hacia los hispanos en EEUU
Según datos proporcionados por el Pew Hispanic Center (2010), "aproximadamente
cuatro de cada cinco de los aproximadamente 11.1 millones de inmigrantes no autorizados del
país son de origen hispano (Passell and Cohn, 2010)". La propia población de origen hispano,
que en dicho estudio considera el estatus migratorio una de los factores más importantes que
contribuyen a su discriminación en los EEUU (considerada dicha discriminación como un "gran
problema" para el 61% de la población), tiene opiniones dispares sobre la inmigración, tal y
como reflejan los datos del Pew Hispanic Center mencionados anteriormente. Debido a la
importancia crucial de este tema en la sociedad estadounidense actual, para esta comunicación
se van a tomar como base los principios de la "Teoría de posicionamiento" ("Stance Theory":
Du Bois 2002a, 2002b, 2004, 2007; Jaffe, 2009) con el fin de analizar las opiniones y actitudes
de un grupo de estudiantes universitarios estadounidenses que se especializan en español sobre
la inmigración ilegal de origen hispano y la repercusión de este tema en la discriminación hacia
la población latina en los EEUU. Específicamente, el estudio se centrará en el análisis de los
recursos lingüísticos, estructurales y discursivos empleados por estos estudiantes para expresar
su opinión sobre este tema en documentos escritos (en concreto, tres tareas de clase en las que
tienen que hacer reflexiones críticas)[1], de ahí la importancia del examen de expresiones
lingüísticas que permitan conocer el "posicionamiento subjetivo" de los estudiantes (tanto el de
los estudiantes de origen hispano como el de los que no lo son) y que así puedan compararse
para poder establecer posibles semejanzas y/o diferencias entre las visiones de ambos grupos.
El análisis intentará ofrecer algunas indicaciones sobre qué elemento tiene más peso en la
expresión de opiniones a través de este enfoque de posicionamiento lingüístico: la "conciencia
grupal" (Sánchez 2006) sobre la comunidad latina por ambos grupos de estudiantes, el grado de
influencia y repercusión de la aculturación y el racismo (Santana (2018) o el grado de
diferencia étnica en comparación con la idea del "americano prototípico" (Eberhardt, Davies,
Purdie- Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006), por citar algunos.

[1] En este grupo hay estudiantes de origen hispano y otros que no lo son. Además de analizar
los textos escritos que produzcan, cada estudiante completará un cuestionario
sociodemográfico para determinar a cuál de los dos grupos pertenecen y otra información
relevante al estudio.

Du Bois, John W. (2002a). Stance & Consequence. Paper read at the American
Anthropological Association Conference in New Orleans, November 21.
-- (2002b) Stance and Intersubjectivity in Dialogic Interaction. Paper read at Linguistics
Colloquium, University of California at Santa Barbara, April 11, 2002.
-- (2004) Stance and Intersubjectivity. Paper read at the Stance Taking in Discourse:
Subjectivity in Interaction symposium at Rice University, Houston, TX. April 3.
-- (2007). The stance triangle. In Englebretson, R. (Ed), Stancetaking in discourse:
Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 139-182.
Eberhardt, J. L., Davies, P.G., Purdie-Vaughns, V.J., Johnson, S.L. (2006) Looking
deathworthy: Perceived stereotypicality of black defendants predicts capital-sentencing

64
outcomes. Psychological Science, 17, pp. 383–386.
Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Passel, J., Cohn, D., & Gonzalez-Barrera, A. (2013). Net migration from Mexico falls to
zero— and perhaps less. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. Retrieved from:
http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2012/04/Mexican-migrants-report_final.pdf
Sánchez, G. R. (2006). The role of group consciousness in Latino public opinion. Political
Research Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 435-446.

65
 Fontes Martins, Raquel Márcia Universidade Federal de Lavras, Ana Paula Huback,
Columbia University; João Vítor Lima Barbosa, Universidade Federal de Lavras
The phonetic realization of R in coda position in Brazilian Portuguese: Discussing
language attitudes
The present article discusses language attitudes and ideologies by investigating the
phonetic realization of R at the end of a syllable in Brazilian Portuguese. This case is also used
to discuss how language discrimination is a form of social discrimination. Some linguistic
forms can be more or less prestigious because of the context in which they are used (rural x
urban, for example), rather than any feature of the language structure itself. In Brazilian
Portuguese, R in coda position has several phonetic realizations. In the present article, we will
analyze the retroflex [ɻ] and the glottal [h] forms. The retroflex form is usually the variant used
in the countryside, whereas the glottal version is more recurrent in urban scenarios. An
experiment was conducted in order to analyze the reaction native speakers have towards these
R varieties. The first part of the experiment had two groups of two people each: a man and a
woman from the countryside, and a man and a woman from the city. Their task was to read a
text that had words with R in coda position. The second part of the experiment was to have two
other groups of four speakers each (two women and two men from the city, and two women and
two men from the countryside). These speakers had to listen to the recordings from the first
group and rate those speakers with regards to social status, competence, level of urbanization,
and solidarity. Similar studies have already been carried out by Weinreich; Labov; Herzog,
1968; Labov, 1994a, 2008 with regards to the evaluation problem of linguistic forms. Since the
retroflex R is typical in rural areas, our goal was to analyze if speakers from either the country
or the city would show a negative bias towards this form. The results show that speakers from
both the city and the country rated the glottal pronunciation as more prestigious than the
retroflex one, especially in terms of social status, competence, and urbanization. It is important
to emphasize that the native
speakers from the countryside considered their own speech to be less prestigious than that of
the city, which shows a disloyal attitude towards their own dialect. We argue that the fact that
the retroflex form had such low ratings is a statement on how cultural and economic aspects of
rural life are perceived, rather than being a characteristic of the sound itself. A similar study
was carried out by Labov (2008) in which the results show that the retroflex variant was a mark
of higher social status, which is the opposite of what our study shows. That provides further
evidence that it is how we associate the sound and the group that speaks it that really matter. We
can then state that language attitudes are socially determined and the social context plays a role
in the way speakers evaluate their language.
 

66
 Mastromartino, Alexandra
“MOLA MAZO, TÍA.” VOCATIVES IN MADRID SPANISH ABSTRACT
Vocatives in conversational discourse express the relationship between interlocutors,
including distance versus proximity, respect as opposed to familiarity, power versus solidarity,
and formality in contrast to informality. In Spanish, vocatives such as tío (lit. ‘uncle’) and
hombre (lit. ‘man’) can have various functions, including calling the attention of a listener and
forming social bonds with peers. Their multifunctionality, variety, and frequency of use by
native Spanish speakers make them an especially relevant topic for linguistic research. This
study’s principle objectives were to determine vocative use and choice by native speakers of
Madrid Spanish and examine attitudes of these speakers regarding the use of vocatives.
A three-pronged study examining vocative use by native Madrid Spanish speakers was
implemented. In the first experiment, four participants, ages 19-25, recorded their informal
conversations with friends and family. Vocatives used by these speakers were polyfunctional
and served to form and maintain bonds with peers, initiate and maintain contact, and add
emphasis to an utterance. Level of friendship or social relationship, age and gender of the
participants in an interaction, as well as the context of the conversation, influenced vocative
use.
Additionally, a survey, including a discourse completion task (DCT) and perception
task, was completed by 81 Madrid Spanish speakers over 18. In the DCT, participants were
asked what they would say in certain contexts. The perception task asked participants to rank
seven characteristics (level of education, intelligence, friendliness, professional capability,
directness, level of empathy, general opinion) on a Likert scale. These two experiments showed
vocative use depends on the perceived level of relationship between interlocutors, level of
formality of a conversation, and age and gender of the interlocutors. Results of the perception
task indicate that native speaker attitudes are impacted by vocative use.
This project aimed to improve upon previous works by combining and simplifying
previous classification methods of vocative functions. It is the only known study that combines
these three experiments in the analysis of vocatives, thus providing a more holistic account of
vocative use and perceptions by native speakers of Madrid Spanish. The results demonstrate
that vocatives are a multifunctional feature of Madrid Spanish that warrant further
investigation.

INDEX WORDS: Vocatives, Madrid Spanish, Youth speech, Pragmatics, Discourse markers,
Discourse completion task, Perception task
 

67
Matachana Lopez, Claudia & Daniela Narvaez, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“Spanish Words You’ve been saying WRONG”: Language ideologies and
standardization in Spanish in the US.
In the US 48.6 million people speak Spanish according to the U.S. Census Bureau (2011),
and the number of Spanish speakers is projected to rise significantly through the next years,
depending on the assumption one makes about immigration. Hispanics in the US are complex,
heterogeneous people that speak many languages such as standard English, standard Spanish,
North Mexican Spanish, Tex-Mex, Pachuco, Spanglish, etc. (Anzaldua 1987:77). Moreover, is
not only about the different languages, but also many Spanish varieties are spoken within the US,
which can answer to geographical, individual or social class reasons. Hispanics in the US face
both external -that can be seen in performances such as mock Spanish- and internal linguistic
discrimination. Internal linguistic discrimination can obey to historical and cultural reasons
(Escobar and Potowski 2015). Language ideologies have shaped negative attitudes towards these
varieties within the same Hispanic community. These attitudes have an impact in the speakers of
the varieties that fall under the idea of ‘incorrect’, creating stereotypes among their speakers that
can affect their access to jobs or educational performance. These ideas are not only transmitted
through media, politics, discourses, but also through alternative platforms such as Youtube, a
transnational media and space where linguistics signs can receive other interpretations that differ
from the original ones (Chun 2013). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze the content and
comments of two Youtube videos “10 Spanish Words You’ve Been Saying Wrong” and “Neutral
Spanish vs. Dominican Spanish” in order to unveil linguistic ideologies towards standard
Spanish in the US. Following Bucholtz and Hall (2005) we will examine the discourse produced
in these clips as well as the comments posted on them to show how language ideologies and
participants’ identity is produced in interaction. We will look at how language ideologies about
the ‘correct’ Spanish are produced and how linguistic attitudes shape the idea of the standard. We
aim to answer the questions what are the indexical values of linguistic forms such as “marketa”,
or other non- standard forms present in the video, according to this online community? What
does this community seem to understand as the standard? How does this idea of correct/standard
Spanish is encouraged in these types of videos? And what is the cultural significance of
embodiments of linguistic signs that in a transnational space as Youtube received other
interpretations than within the US? According to Flores y Rosa (2015:150), these discourses of
appropriateness, involve the conceptualization of standardized linguistic practices as objective
sets of linguistic forms that are understood to be “correct”. We also seek to highlight the
racializing language ideologies through which different racialized bodies come to be constructed
in this site. We focus on the processes through which performers and audiences connect
linguistic forms with complex sociocultural meanings while also making claims about the
realness of language through processes of authentication and denaturalization (Bucholtz and Hall
2004)

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, G. 1987. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. (Pp. 75-86)
Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and Interaction: A Sociocultural Linguistic
Approach.” Discourse Studies 7: 585–614.
Chun, E. W. 2013. “Ironic Blackness as Masculine Cool: Asian American Language and
Authenticity on YouTube.” Applied Linguistics 34 (5): 592–612.
Escobar, A., & Potowski, K. (2015). El Español de los Estados Unidos. Cambridge:
68
Cambridge University Press.
Flores, N. and Rosa, J. 2015. Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and
Linguistic Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review 85 (2).

69
Mac
  Gregor Mendoza, Patricia & Gabriela Moreno, New Mexico State University
Discovering and Acknowledging SHL Learners’ Reading Skills
Scholars acknowledge that there is a dearth of research on reading from a HL
perspective (e.g. Beaudrie, Ducar & Potowski, 2014; Bernhardt, 2003; Chevalier,
2004; Grimm, Solari, Gerber, Nylund-Gibson & Swanson, 2019; Kondo-Brown, 2003;
Lo-Phillip, 2010; van de Velde Kremin, Arredondo, Hsu, Satterfield & Kovelman,
2019). As such, teachers are often unaware of what literacy skills SHL learners possess
and how these skills can be supported. We assert that SHL literacy skills are not
inexistent, rather, that they are harder to divine with traditional assessments, such as
those used in placement exams. Our efforts in designing an innovative reading task as
part of a placement measure to aid in distinguishing between L2 and SHL learners, has
led us to investigate how we can better integrate diverse literary forms to identify and
build on the literacy skills that learners already possess and/or practice in their
communities. The presentation will illustrate how non-traditional reading passages can
be used to differentiate the literacy skills of SHL learners from those of L2 learners
and how learners’ performance on these reading tasks aligns with their class level as
 well as estimates of their own linguistic abilities.

70
Medina-Rivera, Antonio, Cleveland State University
Proyectos para las clases de lingüística

En esta presentación se hará referencia al aprendizaje y enseñanza por medio de

proyectos (PBL-Project Based Learning/Instruction). Durante mis años de experiencia he visto
la necesidad de dinamizar mis clases de Introducción a la Lingüística, Historia de la Lengua
Española y Lingüística Aplicada por medio de proyectos que les permiten a los estudiantes
aplicar los conceptos aprendidos en clase de una manera creativa. El PBL les permite a los
estudiantes enfrentarse a problemas concretos y resolverlos fuera de la clase. Los proyectos se
pueden llevar a cabo de una manera individualizada como en grupos pequeños, o un problema
general para la clase y asignarles distintas partes del proyecto a cada uno de los estudiantes.
Haré referencia a distintos proyectos que he realizado en clase con mis estudiantes durante los
últimos 5 años.

71
    
Melero-García, Fernando University of Texas Arlington Alejandro Cisneros,
Colorado State University Global
Experience matters: The acquisition of trill variation by L2 learners with varying
degrees of experience with Spanish
 Spanish has two contrastive rhotic segments: a tap /ɾ/ and a trill /r/. The canonical
description of Spanish states that taps are usually produced with a rapid contact of the
tongue apex against the alveolar ridge, whereas trills are produced with multiple contacts or
occlusions (Hualde, 2014). Despite such canonical description, previous acoustic analyses
have shown that native speakers of Spanish often produce trills with one single occlusion in
natural speech, and that, rather than the number of occlusions, segment duration has a
significant contrastive role in the production of Spanish rhotics: trills are longer than taps,
even when both are produced with one single occlusion (Bradley & Willis, 2012; Willis &
Bradley, 2008).
Within the usage-based theoretical framework (Bybee, 1999), it is argued that use of
and experience with language shapes linguistic knowledge and representations. The goal of
this study is to test this hypothesis by examining the role of duration on the perception and
categorization of Spanish /ɾ/ and /r/ by both native speakers of Spanish and second language
learners with varying degrees of experience with Spanish. Based on the results reported in
the aforementioned acoustic studies, it is hypothesized that, when presented with a stimulus
containing a Spanish rhotic with one single occlusion, native speakers of Spanish will rely
on duration to categorize the stimulus as either /ɾ/ or /r/. Specifically, longer rhotics will be
perceived as /r/, whereas shorter rhotics will be perceived as /ɾ/.
Regarding second language learners, it is hypothesized that those with more
experience with Spanish will attend to duration to categorize Spanish taps and trills, whereas
those with less experience with Spanish will rely primarily on number of occlusions to
categorize /ɾ/ and /r/. In order to create the perceptual task, four speakers of Spanish recorded
a list of twelve minimal pairs with /ɾ/-/r/. The stimuli containing taps were extracted for the
study, and the /ɾ/ segment of each stimulus was digitally manipulated by increasing its
duration in intervals of 15ms. A total of 183 stimuli resulted from such manipulations with a
duration range of 10-93ms. These stimuli were then transferred to an online questionnaire. A
total of 47 native speakers of Spanish and 80 adult second language learners completed the
survey. In order to operationalize experience with Spanish, learners provided information
about the course level in which they were enrolled at a large Midwestern university, their use
of Spanish outside the classroom setting, and their experience living and/or studying abroad.
Participants were asked to listen to each stimulus once and choose from two possible options
about the word they heard (e.g., caro ‘expensive’, or carro ‘car’). In addition, participants
were asked to rate its pronunciation using a 4-point Likert scale. The results confirm the
aforementioned hypotheses and suggest that increased experience with language has a
significant effect on the development of native-like phonological representations.
The current study contributes to the fields of Second Language Phonology,
Laboratory Phonology and, specifically, to the acquisition of variable structures within
the framework of usage-based theory.

References
Bybee, J. (1999). Usage-based phonology. Functionalism and formalism in linguistics, 1,
211-242.
Bradley, T. G., & Willis, E. W. (2012). Rhotic variation and contrast in Veracruz Mexican
Spanish. Estudios de fonética experimental, 21, 43-74.
72
Hualde, J. I. (2014). Los sonidos del español: Spanish language edition.
Cambridge University Press.
Willis, E. W., & Bradley, T. G. (2008). Contrast maintenance of taps and trills in Dominican
Spanish: Data and analysis. In L. Colantoni, & J. Steele (eds.). Selected proceedings of the 3rd
Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Spanish Phonology (pp. 87-100). Cascadilla
Proceedings Project.
 

73
Melero-García, Fernando , University of Texas Arlington
An acoustic and perceptual examination of phonological variation of stop consonants in
eastern Andalusian Spanish

Spanish has two series of phonemic stop consonants: /p t k/ on the one hand, and /b d
ɡ/ on the other. These two groups of consonants contrast in voicing, which refers to the
activity of the vocal folds: /p t k/ are voiceless (i.e., produced without vibration of the vocal
folds), whereas /b d ɡ/ are voiced (i.e., produced with vibration of the vocal folds). Despite
this general characterization, the results of an analysis of 2,400 tokens of /p t k/ in
Andalusian Spanish indicate that 13% of them were fully voiced, 42% were partially voiced,
and 45% were fully voiceless. In other words, less than half of the instances of /p t k/ that
were analyzed were produced in a prototypical manner.
The fact that /p t k/ are often produced with phonetic voicing raises important
questions with significant phonological implications. For instance, how do speakers
maintain the /p t k/ ~ /b d ɡ/ contrast when both groups of consonants are produced as voiced
variants? Or is the /p t k/ ~ /b d ɡ/ contrast being lost? In order to address these questions, an
acoustic comparison of the two groups was carried out. The results of this analysis suggest
that, in general, there are significant differences of duration and degree of constriction
between /b d ɡ/ and voiced /p t k/: voiced /p t k/ are longer and more constricted than /b d ɡ/.
Finally, a perceptual experiment was conducted in order to examine whether listeners
of this variety attend to duration and degree of constriction rather than voicing to categorize
/p t k/ and /b d ɡ/. A series of stimuli containing intervocalic /b d ɡ/ were recorded by a
speaker of the same variety of Spanish. Then, those intervocalic /b d ɡ/ were manipulated.
Specifically, their duration and degree of constriction were increased. A perceptual
identification task that included both the original and the manipulated stimuli was completed
by 97 participants, all of whom were from the same town. The results of the perceptual task
suggest a significant incipient effect of duration and degree of constriction on the
perception of /p t k/ and /b d ɡ/.
This study provides a significant methodological contribution to the growing body of
work in laboratory phonology and studies of sound change. From a theoretical point of view,
recent linguistic theories, such as usage-based theory, argue that language use and frequency
of occurrence shape our cognitive representation of language. In this sense, and given the
amount of variation that exists in speech production as a result of gestural overlap, an
examination of the acoustic cues to which listeners attend in a variety of Spanish where
lenition is a prevalent phenomenon sheds light on how listeners handle variation, what their
underlying representation of speech sounds looks like, and how sound change takes place.

74
Roohollah Mofidi: Assistant Professor, Imam Khomeini International University (Qazvin,
Iran) & Sepideh Koohkan: Joint Ph.D, Tarbiat Modares University (Tehran), and
University of Antwerp
Introducing a Modal Clause in a Few Iranian Languages
In our investigation on the modal concept ‘be able to’ in 104 modern west Iranian
varieties (some of them independent languages, and some dialects of the same language), from
10 main branches (based on Windfuhr’s 2009 categorization), we found out that in most cases
the verbs expressing ‘be able to’ are derived from the sources which were primarily main
verbs: i) *xšāya ‘be able’; ii) tav-/*teu-‘increase’; iii) zan ‘know’; and iv) šaw/šiyaw ‘to go’.
However, there is an idiomatic expression, which is not related to any of these sources
historically: TIG=clitic vontemon (literally meaning ‘someone’s razor cuts’) in some varieties
spoken in central Iran. This paper studies the features of this construction in one of these
varieties, namely Kahangi, to show how an idiom, which is losing its grammatical features,
behaves the same as a modal auxiliary.
The data is collected using two questionnaires and recording 13 hours of daily
conversations of five male and four female informants.
tiG=clitic vontemon, as a full clause, is constructed of ‘razor’ as the subject, a
possessive clitic and the transitive verb (to cut) and it means ‘somebody’s razor cuts’. Kahangi
has a ‘split ergative system’ in agreement; that means the agent of the past transitive verb is
marked with clitics. Although vontemon ‘to cut’ as a transitive verb follows this rule in other
contexts, in this clause it doesn’t obtain agent clitic, rather it behaves more like an intransitive
verb where the subject (tiG) is marked with endings both in present (-u ) and past tense (-Ø).
Below you see this clause in the past tense:

Other certain explanations also show this form is being grammaticalized. First, instead
of marking the predicate of the clause for progressive or subjunctive present indicative is used.
Moreover, this clause has an alternative that uses a form of the verb bojmon ‘to be’ instead of ;
vontemon; i.e. tiG=em=u/bu literally means ‘my razor is/was’ and idiomatically means ‘I
can/could’. Semantically, this idiom marks deontic, circumstantial, and participant-internal
(ability) modality.
In Kahangi there is also a less frequent modal auxiliary, i.e. beʃ derived from *xšaya
which marks permission, circumstantial, and ability in restricted contexts. However, beʃ started
bleaching semantically and emerges a new construction that is less grammatical, more
concrete, more schematic that ‘fulfills similar functions’; something that ‘tends to associate
meaning directly with form’ (Bybee, 2015: 238). This choice for the language of Kahangi is
tiG=clitic vontemon. The same idiom (with some verbal changes) exists in other Iranian
languages as an alternative to mean ‘having enough power’, but in Kahangi this clause has
changed to the main element to
express ability and other related notions. By losing many grammatical features it seems
we are observing a clause that intends to be a source for a modal auxiliary.
Keywords: Modality, grammaticalization, modal clause, Iranian languages
References
BYBEE, J. L. (2015). Language Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
WINDFUHR, G. (2009). The Iranian Languages, London and New York: Routledge.
75
Moyna, Maria Irene, Texas A&M University
Montevideo in the Río de la Plata dialect area: Igual y un poco distinto
This paper considers linguistic variation in informal address in Montevideo (Uruguay),
as compared to Buenos Aires (Argentina), its sister city across the estuary and the undisputed
center of influence in the dialect area. Although both cities favor voseo, they differ because in
Buenos Aires this form is categorical (Lipski 1996: 194), while in Montevideo it continues to
appear in variation with tuteo (Lipski 1996: 373-374, Fontanella de Weinberg 1999,
Carricaburo 2010).
This study ascertained to what extent Montevideo continues to exhibit variation, and
what social and pragmatic factors determine it. It found that there is general coincidence
between the two cities, and young Montevideo speakers are indeed moving in the direction of
their Buenos Aires counterparts. That said, the ratio of tuteo is not negligible and encodes
meaningful socioeconomic and pragmatic information.
Of all the Latin American capitals, Buenos Aires and Montevideo are the closest,
literally and figuratively. Located a mere 200 kilometers apart, they are linked by a richly
interconnected history dating back to colonial times. After independence in the 19th century,
both received large contingents of European immigrants, mostly from Spain and Italy, which
continued to give them similar demographic and social profiles. In the intervening century,
travel, tourism, and cultural exchange have intensified this connection. The closeness has
linguistic manifestations, making the two dialects difficult to tell apart by lay people and
experts alike (but cf. Michnowicz & Planchón in press, and Coll & Resnick in press).
The informal address system stands out as one of the few reliable distinctive features (Behares
1981, Bertolotti 2011). The verbal systems of both dialects are similar, with voseo in the
imperative (¡comé! ‘eat!’) and present indicative (comés ‘you eat’), and tuteo generally
preferred in the preterite (comiste ‘you ate’) and present subjunctive ([que] comas ‘[that] you
eat- SUBJ’). However, the pronouns show differences, with tuteo and voseo alternating in
nominative (tú vs. vos), prepositional (para ti vs. para vos ‘for you’), and comitative forms
(contigo vs. con vos ‘with you’).
To quantify these differences, data were collected with a reported usage questionnaire
(n=367), where participants chose between tuteo and voseo in all the loci of variation. A
logistic regression in Rbrul (Johnson 2009) measured the impact of social factors, including
speaker age, gender, income, occupation, schooling, educational attainment, and addressee
gender. It was found that while Montevideo speakers preferred voseo, their usage was not
uniform across the paradigm. In the pronoun, voseo preference was highest in the nominative,
and lower in prepositional case, while the comitative overwhelmingly favored tuteo. For the
verbs, the imperative and present indicative favored voseo almost categorically, while in the
preterite, tuteo forms were chosen. The present subjunctive exhibited the most complex
pattern, with address determined by pragmatic context (subordinate vs. preventive vs.
cessative).
To conclude, Buenos Aires does indeed provide the thrust for most innovations in
Montevideo Spanish, with voseo pushing out tuteo among the younger generations. That said,
the analysis showed Montevideo’s independent streak: the presence of tuteo pronouns allows
for the encoding of subtle socio-pragmatic information in unique ways.
  

76
 Sean Muller & Sara Fernández Cuenca, Wake Forest University
Integration of TalkAbroad conversations: A study on students’ preparation and
perceptions with different tasks
 
This project examines the integration of the videoconferencing tool TalkAbroad (TA)1
in an intermediate-high level Spanish content-based conversation course. The challenges and
benefits of using TA in a foreign language course have been previously investigated by others
(Echevarria, 2019; Sama & Wu, 2019); however, the focus has only been on assessing
students’ autonomy and linguistic benefits after completing several TA sessions in the course
of a semester. With recent advances in technology, it is imperative for educators to
thoroughly research the effects and benefits of online foreign language communication
programs in order to form the most effective curriculum possible regarding foreign language
acquisition in higher education (Echevarria, 2019). The present study focuses on how TA
conversations have the potential to be a meaningful task integrated in the content of the
course. More specifically, we examine how two different TA conversations with different
objectives affect students’ preparation for the TA conversation and perceptions before and
after completing it. TA task 1 was framed as an informal conversation about a topic both the
native speakers (NSs) and students were interested in and was part of the content covered in
the Spanish conversation course students were enrolled in. TA task 2 was more goal-oriented
and required an exchange of knowledge between the student and the NSs regarding the
subject matter chosen by the student, which sometimes deviated from the content covered in
class. In addition, this study aims to use an initial data pool consisting of 20 (30 min)
transcribed conversations of Spanish students with Spanish native speakers to explore
potential conversational challenges experienced and strategies used by students in these
conversations with the final objective to revisit the course objectives to better reflect these
Spanish students’ conversational needs. Our research questions are: (1) Does the kind of TA
task make a difference in terms of students’ preparation and perceptions? And (2) What kind
of conversational challenges and strategies do students experience/used when completing
these two TA tasks? We employed a quantitative approach using students self- reported
reflections post-task completion and their conversations. Preliminary results suggest that the
answer to RQ1 is yes. Overall, students tend to prepare more for TA task 2 than task 1.
In addition, preparation for TA task 2 was often more content than linguistic-oriented.
See quotes on the preliminary results page. Quotes from both of the student’s self-reported
reflections are presented side-by-side. With regard to RQ2, we observed that students adopted
a respectful turn- taking strategy that often hindered the flow of conversation; however, further
analysis must be conducted to confirm this initial observation.

77
 Preliminary results

TA task 1 TA task 2

“Regarding the topics…I did not review any “I spent a lot more time preparing for this
vocabulary beforehand. I mainly asked her conversation by reading articles about the
general questions about those two areas…” life of a dancer and some examples of daily
schedules of professional dancers. This
preparation made the conversation smoother
because I had most of the things I wanted to
say already planned out.”

“I didn’t prepare any vocab…But because I “I spent more time preparing for this one
didn’t prepare any vocab I did a lot of mostly looking for law related vocabulary.
circumlocution…” It made it easier and I felt like I was able to
bounce off what she said easily.”

1
This platform allows individuals to schedule a video call with a native speaker of the
language they are interested in practicing. The user can browse different NS profiles that
contain personal information about their hobbies and studies, as well as their country of origin

78
 Naranjo Hayes, Elizabeth, The University of Alabama
Coda /s/ of 3 top Medellín-born music artists: A comparative acoustic study of their
music and interviews
Now that American consumption of Latin artists is at an all-time high (Billboard
Charts, Jun 2020; YouTube Charts, Jun 2020; Spotify Charts, Jun 2020), are Karol G, J
Balvin, and Maluma, three Medellín-born music artists topping the charts in the US (Billboard
Latin Charts), modifying their pronunciation in their songs? Or, are they holding to the
pronunciation of their regional variety of Spanish? What might cause a difference in their
pronunciation? This comparative acoustic study measures whether there is maintenance or
non-maintenance [aspiration or elision] of the coda /s/ in the pronunciation of 3 songs by each
artist, versus the pronunciation in their interviews.
This topic is particularly relevant to Latinx in the US: a group comprised of diverse
regional varieties of Spanish and who widely follow top Latin music. A large segment of
English-speaking Americans also follow Latin music, and more American artists are now
collaborating in Spanish-English bilingual songs. The pronunciation of coda /s/ has been
widely studied and has been determined to be a salient dialect characteristic (Lipski, 1984,
1986, 1994; Boomershine, 2006; Luna, 2018). It has been studied with language leveling
(Erker & Otheguy, 2005), and with identity linguistics (O’Rourke & Potowski, 2016), but it
has not been studied with popular Latin music.
Three top songs and long interviews were downloaded from YouTube and analyzed via
Praat.org (Boersema & Weenink, 2019). Words were coded to determine qualifying coda /s/
tokens, then they were coded by manual delimitation on the waveform and spectrogram to
determine whether there was maintenance or non-maintenance [aspiration/elision] of the coda
/s/.
There was a statistically significant difference at p < .01 in the pronunciation of all the artists
in their songs versus in their interviews.

79
 Okine, Ewurama, Texas A&M University
Codeswitching in Rap: An analysis of contemporary Ghanaian songs,

This paper explores multilingualism and codeswitching in contemporary rap songs in Ghana.
Its objective, identifying the role of language in Ghanaian artistic compositions in the 21st
century, contributes to the discussion on codeswitching in lyrical representations. Existing
literature explores codeswitching in Romance and Indo-European languages like
Spanish-English (Loureiro-Rodriguez, 2017; Loureiro-Rodriguez, Moyna, & Robles, 2018),
French-English (Sarkar & Winer, 2006; Sarkar, Winer, & Sarkar, 2005), Spanish-Galician
(Loureiro-Rodriguez, 2013). While there have been studies on African languages (Babalola &
Taiwo, 2009; Idowu- Faith, 2011; Liadi, 2012; Oduro-Frimpong, 2009; Quarcoo, Amuzu, &
Owusu, 2014), some are narrow in range and focus on few songs. This study contributes
research on codeswitching in a corpus of songs in Ghanaian languages.
The data includes all 30 songs from an album by renowned Ghanaian musician
Michael Owusu Addo, known artistically as Sarkodie, who made his debut in 2009 with his
fast-paced Twi rap. He thus created a unique artistic identity which placed him on
international music stages, and earned him his most recent recognition on the Billboard Social
50 list in April 2020. In the compositions in his third studio album, Sarkology, Sarkodie
typically uses his mother tongue, Twi, and English. His use of Twi-English codeswitching is
not limited to rap but also used in “hiplife”, a contemporary Ghanaian musical genre that
combines hip-hop elements with those of “highlife”, an earlier local genre characterized by
traditional rhythms and sounds.
The songs were transcribed and analyzed quantitatively to identify their
language-mixing phenomena. Preliminary findings confirm that they are multilingual, with
Twi as primary language in 56%, as secondary language in 33% and as a tertiary or other
language in less than 1%. English is used as the primary language in 40% of them, and as a
secondary language in 53%. Other languages include Hausa, Igbo and Wolof.
Language-mixing is evident in four categories: a) intersentential switches (1); b)
intrasentential switches (2); c) tag switches (3); and
d) lexical insertions within English verbs using Twi affixes (4). While 1-3 employ
codeswitching to facilitate rhyme and lyrical organization in rap, 4 exemplifies a
sociopragmatic function of language use which highlights the role language plays in
developing his artistic identity as a multilingual rapper.
(1) Moa mosei me din no, monni vim. You better speak
up. ‘You slanderer, you are a coward. You better
speak up’
(2) S3 wo hia me fr3 me manager I'm so busy.
‘If you need me, call my manager, I’m so busy’
(3) Wo wie aa mε kyεrε wo lesson, go!
‘When you are done, I will teach you a lesson, go!’
(4) Wo performy aa, DJ nu posey.
‘When you perform, the DJ
poses.’

This analysis of codeswitching in contemporary Ghanaian songs sheds light on musical

representation and its sociolinguistic interaction between multilingualism and
multiculturalism. One of the limitations of the study is its exclusive focus on Twi. Future
research on how other Ghanaian and African languages manifest in language-mixing will
80
provide a fuller picture of the interaction of multiple languages in world music.
Selected Bibliography
Babalola, Taiwo E. and Taiwo, Rotimi. (2009). Code-switching in contemporary Nigerian hip-
hop music. Itupale Online Journal of African Studies, I, 1-26.
Idowu-Faith, Bimbola O. (2011). Language Attitudes and Communicative Realities of
Code- Mixing in Contemporary Nigerian Gospel Music. Conference Proceedings of
the 3rd International Conference on Language and Communication, 164-178.
Liadi, Olusegun F. (2012). Multilingualism and Hip Hop Consumption in Nigeria: Accounting
for the Local Acceptance of a Global Phenomenon. Africa Spectrum, 47(1), 3-19.
Loureiro-Rodríguez, Verónica. (2013). “If We Only Speak Our Language by the Fireside, It
Won't Survive”: The Cultural and Linguistic Indigenization of Hip Hop in Galicia.
Popular Music and Society, 36(5), 659-676.
Loureiro-Rodríguez, Verónica. (2017). Y yo soy cubano, and I’m impatient: Frequency and
functions of Spanish switches in Pitbull’s lyrics. Spanish in Context, 14(2), 250-272.
Loureiro-Rodríguez, Verónica, Moyna, María I., & Robles, Damián. (2018). Hey, baby, ¿Qué
pasó?: Performing bilingual identities in Texan popular music. Language &
Communication, 60, 120-135.
Quarcoo, Millicent, Amuzu, Evershed K., & Owusu Augustina P. (2014). Codeswitching as a
means and a message in hiplife music in Ghana. Contemporary Journal of African
Studies, 2(2), 1-32.
Sarkar, Mela & Winer, Lise. (2006). Multilingual Codeswitching in Quebec Rap: Poetry,
Pragmatics and Performativity. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3(3),
173-192.
Sarkar, Mela, Winer, Lise & Sarkar, Kobir. (2005). Multilingual code-switching in Montreal
Hip-Hop: Mayhem meets method or, “Tout moune qui talk trash kiss mon black ass
du nord.” ISB4: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism,
Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 2057-2074.

81
 Ornelles, Annie, Georgetown University
Evolving Attitudes toward Galician-Spanish Code-Mixing: A Discourse-Analytic Study
One relatively understudied topic in the literature on language contact in Peninsular
linguistics is that of the phenomenon of “castrapo,” defined by the Real Academia Galega as
“a variety of the Spanish language spoken in Galicia” and interpreted by others as an
“undesired mixing of two the contact languages, [Galician and Spanish]” (RAG; O’Rourke,
2018). While its name is derived from the pejorative portmanteau of “castellano” (Spanish)
and “trapo” (rag), recent research into linguistic attitudes of younger generations might
suggest that the stigma around Galician and hybrid-Galician varieties is less prominent than
in older generations (O’Rourke, 2011) and in rural communities (Loureiro-Rodríguez et al.,
2013) than in past decades. While research on language attitudes in Galicia has tended to
focus on either direct (Rubal et al., 1987; Vaamonde, 2003) or traditional indirect methods
(Loureiro- Rodríguez et al., 2013.), noteworthy recent research in the field of language
attitudes has advocated for a more qualitative, discourse-based approach based on interaction
(Soukup, 2007; Liebscher & Dailey- O’Cain, 2009, et al.), highlighting the fluid nature of
language attitudes as constructive practices communicating sociolinguistic indexicality.
In the present context, these new frameworks allow for nuanced analyses into the
varied attitudes speakers hold towards these hybrid varieties. The current study aims to
implement these new methodological approaches toward attitude studies to uncover the
implicit and explicit attitudes held by rural Galician youth with respect to the code-mixed
varied known as “castrapo.” In so doing, the project aims to include a demographic often
overlooked in Galician literature in favor of more accessible urban speakers, who census
data and previous research suggests often hold very different linguistic attitudes for a variety
of socio-historical reasons.
Furthermore, the study aims to present a nuanced look at the attitudes surrounding
code- mixing, which are often quite complex and—at times—contradictory, a tendency that
can best be captured through a qualitative, discourse-analytic approach. Data for the project
result from a series of semi-structured interviews with seven university students originating
from the same rural (> 5000 people) town. Episodes containing language attitudes regarding
the speakers’ code- mixing and use of “castrapo” (if so defined) are identified and analyzed
through a qualitative, interactional-linguistic approach in the typology of Liebscher &
Dailey-O’Cain (2009) and Rodgers (2017) with special attention to explicit vs. implicit modes
of meaning- making, and macro- vs. micro-level analyses. Through analysis of individual
linguistic episodes across participants, a complex portrait of the interpretation of “castrapo” is
presented in which it is suggested that for some rural speakers, the term has lost its original
pejorative connotation or classification as a “defective” form of Spanish in favor of a
definition as a bi- directional or Galician-based variety with which speakers positively
identify themselves, while for others, it continues to hold traditional negative connotations.
These results are discussed in light of changing census data and in relation to the historical
context in which the two languages find themselves within the autonomous community.
Finally, theoretical considerations for discourse- based approaches in the study of language
attitudes are discussed based on the findings.

82
 Orozco Rafael & Johnny Orozco, Louisiana State University

Where is the Spanish Future Going?: A Variationist Analysis

Futurity is expressed in Spanish by means of a tripartite linguistic variable whose

variants are the morphological future (cantaré ‘I will sing’), the present indicative (canto
mañana ‘I sing tomorrow’), and the periphrastic future (voy a cantar ‘I’m going to sing’). This
variationist study explores the Spanish expression of futurity using socially stratified corpora
from three speech communities: a) Barranquilla, Colombia, b) Colombian residents of New
York City, and c) New York City Puerto Ricans. We used multivariate regressions to test the
effects of seven linguistic and three social predictors on a database consisting of 4,485 tokens.
Results show the periphrastic future as the most frequently occurring variant across the board
whereas the morphological future is the least used, especially among the youngest Puerto Rican
speakers. The expression of futurity is conditioned by an intricate combination of linguistic and
social predictors. The internal conditioning, which is largely the same in all three speaker
cohorts, shows verb type as the strongest predictor and reflects the effects of
grammaticalization. These findings provide a good measure of the impact of contact with
English on the evolution of the expression of futurity. The effects of social predictors reflect
New York Colombians’ assimilation to their new sociolinguistic landscape. They show
tendencies similar to those of the New York Puerto Rican speakers but different from those
prevalent in Colombia. Concurrently, the morphological future is under stronger social
conditioning than the other two variants and conspicuously absent from younger speakers’
linguistic repertoires, suggesting its imminent demise. In broad terms, our findings corroborate
the postulate that direct language contact situations often accelerate changes already in progress
before the inception of language contact (Silva-Corvalán 1994:212; Gutiérrez 1995; Orozco
2018). In addition, findings provide robust evidence of the virtual completion of a change in
progress aided by the favorable New York City sociolinguistic environment. Eventually, the
morphological future would cease to function as a marker of futurity, and the expression of
futurity would become a binary linguistic variable, with the periphrastic future and the simple
present as its variants. These findings augment our collective knowledge of language variation.
Specifically, they help explain other instances of morphosyntactic variation leading to change
involving synthetic and analytic variants.
Furthermore, our results provide information helpful in comparing the sociolinguistic
forces conditioning variation in New York City to those in other (Hispanic) speech
communities.

83
 Orozco, Johnny & Rafael Orozco, Louisiana State University
Lexical Effects on Subject Pronoun Expression
This study expands on recent analyses that explore the effect of the verb on the
alternation between overt and null pronominal subjects; i.e., subject pronoun expression
(SPE). We use 14,250 tokens from four speech communities in two different dialect regions:
(a) Barranquilla, Colombia, (b) Medellín, Colombia, (c) New York City Colombians, and (d)
Xalapa, Mexico. Although verb semantics has been found to be a robust SPE predictor, it has
been explored using several different predictor/factor configurations (Carvalho, Orozco
& Shin 2015; Otheguy & Zentella 2012; Torres-Cacoullos & Travis 2018; among others). Our
multivariate regression results for lexical content and verb type largely concur with those of
previous studies, confirming that verb semantics significantly conditions SPE. Nevertheless,
these results fail to augment our collective knowledge. Thus, we analyze the lexical effect of
the verb—a recently proposed alternative to verb semantics (Orozco 2018)—by testing verbs
as random effects factors in further multivariate regression analyses. These results uncover
opposite statistically significant tendencies between verbs in the same semantic category in all
four communities. For example, in Barranquilla recordar ‘remember’ favors overt subjects
but acordarse ‘remember’ has the opposite effect; in NYC ir ‘go’ favors overt subjects but
salir ‘leave’ favors null subjects; in Xalapa ser ‘be’ favors overt subjects but estar ‘be’ exerts
the opposite tendency; and in Medellín, ver ‘see, look’ favors overt subjects but mirar ‘see,
look’ disfavors them.
These results provide a more detailed account of how the verb conditions SPE. They
show that grouping verbs according to semantic criteria in exploring how they condition SPE
fails to uncover important differences. Moreover, cross-dialectal comparisons reveal that,
despite tener ‘have’ being the most frequent verb in SPE contexts, the lexical effects of the
verb lack the cross-dialectal consistency exhibited by all other internal SPE predictors (cf.
Carvalho, Orozco & Shin 2015:xv; Torres-Cacoullos & Travis 2018). For instance,
estar ‘be’ favors overt subjects in Barranquilla, has a neutral effect in both Medellín and New
York, and favors null subjects in Xalapa. Concurrently, hacer ‘make, do’ promotes overt
subjects in NYC and has a neutral effect in Barranquilla but favors null subjects in both
Xalapa and Medellín. Therefore, these findings set the verb apart from all other linguistic SPE
predictors. They suggest that the apparent differences in how the verb conditions SPE across
different speech communities may be caused by the effects of lexical idiosyncrasy. That is, the
lexical effects of the verb in a given speech community differ from those elsewhere; thus,
challenging the premise that the internal conditioning on SPE is largely similar
cross-dialectally. This analysis expands our analytical scope, as it improves the accountability
of our findings on SPE. Further, this study, by offering a new perspective on the lexical effect
of the verb, contributes to opening exciting research paths.
References
Carvalho, Ana, Rafael Orozco, & Naomi Shin. 2015. Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish:
A cross- dialectal perspective. Washington DC: Georgetown UP.
Otheguy, Ricardo & Ana Celia Zentella. 2012. Spanish in New York: Language contact,
dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Orozco, Rafael. 2018. El castellano colombiano en la ciudad de Nueva York: Uso
variable de sujetos pronominales. Studies in Lusophone and Hispanic Linguistics.
11,1:89-129. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2018-0004
Torres-Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine Travis. 2018. Bilingualism in the Community
Code-switching and Grammars in Contact. Cambridge, UK.: Cambridge UP.
84
  Papadopoulos, Benjamin, University of California, Berkeley
Latinx as the Decolonization of Spanish
The term latinx, part of a larger set of innovative Spanish forms meant to avoid
gendering human subjects, has proliferated in Spanish- and English-language speech
communities, across social media networks, and even in some university contexts. By
forgoing the canonically gendered terms latino and latina, authors and adopters of latinx and
related forms recognize a relationship between grammatical gender and social gender which
is not always identified within linguistic research, but which has motivated linguistic activism
addressing the problematic ways that gender is encoded into language for decades. The -x is
one of many gender-neutral/non- binary morphemic and pronominal innovations to Spanish
grammatical gender (e.g. l*s alumn*s ‘the students,’ elle ‘they [sg.],’ latine) which seeks
either to add another grammatical gender designating specifically non-binary (social) gender,
or to collapse the distinction of gender in language entirely, creating true gender neutrality
(Lara Icaza, 2014; Gómez, 2016). While the significance and usage of these innovations
varies between the speech communities that employ them, the use of the -x in former settler
colonies has elicited particular associations with Indigeneity and the Indigenous languages of
México which feature orthographic <x> (Salinas, 2020). With this insight, the -x and other
methods of ‘undoing’ grammatical gender can be understood as the decolonization of Spanish
in Latin America and the United States by tracing the role of language through decolonial
feminist theory (e.g. Lugones, 2008), which provides a more complete account of the power
structures underlying gendered language than Western feminist, queer, and trans theory alone.
Because the Spanish language was a colonial imposition in these zones, meant to
acculturate and colonize the minds and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples (Mignolo,
1995; Maldonado-Torres, 2007), the coloniality of Spanish in former settler colonies is
reflected in the
nation-state institutions which have historically tried to render Indigenous languages extinct,
and which have simultaneously imposed inferiorizing categories of race (Quijano, 1992a/2007)
and binary gender (Lugones, 2008) as interrelated instruments of genocide and social
domination.
The Real Academia Española [RAE] 'Royal Spanish Academy’ is one such colonial
institution which has participated in the linguistic genocide of Indigenous languages, and
which continues to prescribe patriarchal rules of maximally binary gender in standard
Spanish, making it the primary target for language reformists given its status as the most
influential Spanish language academy. As an extension of the ongoing rejection of feminist,
anti-sexist Spanish language reform proposals by the RAE (see Bengoechea, 2008),
gender-neutral/non- binary Spanish language reform proposals continue to be targeted at
institutions of prescriptive language which uphold the coloniality of gender and the
repression of Indigenous languages.
The increasing usage and legitimation of the -x and related innovations can therefore be
understood as a decolonial feminist tool meant to decolonize the Spanish language, as these
forms confront multiple power structures at once and attempt to subvert them by inventing
options for self- expression outside of the institutions put in place by European colonialism.

85
References

Bengoechea, M. (2008). Lo femenino en la lengua: Sociedad, cambio y resistencia normativa.

Lenguaje y Textos, 27, 37-68.
Gómez, R. (2016). Pequeño manifiesto sobre el género neutro en castellano. Retrieved from
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cCrvqLr1IRF7N0bEg9hPDd2eIrLJPnvUY
GUUWz5RNig/edit
Lara Icaza, G. (2014). Proposición X. Género y sexo en el lenguaje escrito [Master’s thesis,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid].
Lugones, M. (2008). The coloniality of gender. Tabula Rasa, 9, 73-102.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies 21(2), 240-270.
Mignolo, W. (1995). The darker side of the renaissance: Literacy, territoriality, and
colonization.
University of Michigan Press.
Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 168-178.
Originally published 1992a.
Salinas, C. (2020). The complexity of the “x” in latinx: How latinx/a/o students relate to,
identify with, and understand the term latinx. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education,
19(2),
149-168.

86
 Peace, Meghann, St. Mary’s University; Isabel Kentengian, The College of New Jersey
& Angela George, University of Calgary
Exploring difficult topics with SHL peers across North America: Three-way virtual
conversation exchanges
Research on Spanish Heritage Learners (SHLs) in the classroom has shown the
importance of interactions with other Spanish-speakers and of reducing linguistic insecurity
(e.g., Authors, 2019; Pascual y Cabo et al., 2017; Sánchez-Muñoz, 2016). To help SHLs
discuss difficult and sensitive topics, positive relationships that promote a sense of equality
and respect should be promoted (Sánchez-Muñoz, 2016) and topics central to the students’
experiences should be discussed (Leeman, 2005).
Studies have shown the benefit of virtual exchanges (e.g., O’Dowd, 2016),
collaboration and peer interaction (e.g., Philp, Adams & Iwashita, 2014; Sato, 2017; Storch,
2002) for developing linguistic skills. The relationship between peer interlocutors, in terms
of equality and mutual engagement, seems to play an essential role in their ability to engage
with the task (Storch (2002). However, two-way virtual exchanges between language
learners of different cultural backgrounds have been critiqued as frequently reifying cultural
differences and for the superficial nature of some of the exchanges (O’Dowd, 2019).
Moreover, the existing research on both peer interaction and virtual exchanges is limited in
the sorts of populations that they investigate; namely, second language speakers involved in
dyadic communication. Whether these effects also apply with SHLs and in groups larger
than two remains largely unaddressed.
This paper presents two virtual conversation exchanges conducted over the course of
a semester among SHLs from three cities across the United States and Canada. The SHLs
selected for analysis came from a pool of approximately 60 SHLs who were of different
Spanish- speaking backgrounds, immigrant generations, and proficiency level. They were
assigned to
three-way groups to engage in two 45-minute virtual exchanges. As the purpose of the first
conversation was to establish familiarity and comfort, students were assigned general
getting-to- know-you topics for discussion, including family, friends, school, communities,
and linguistic experiences. Topics that emerged organically in the first conversation were
assigned for the second conversation, allowing the SHLs to go more in depth discussing
difficult and sensitive topics such as politics, racism, immigration, language discrimination,
and Spanish language use and maintenance.
Content analysis of the conversations and students’ reflections revealed the importance
of
(1) developing relationships over multiple exchanges to promote a sense of security,
equality, and mutuality among SHLs of different linguistic backgrounds and personal
experiences; (2) scaffolding conversations to help students become ready to discuss
difficult issues; and (3) selecting topics that emerged organically from the students’ own
interests and experiences. Additionally, the virtual nature of the exchange allowed SHLs
residing in very diverse parts of North America to share their experiences across their
communities. We conclude by discussing suggestions and strategies for further enriching
similar virtual conversations and collaboration among North American SHLs.

References

Authors. (2019).
87
Leeman, J. (2005). Engaging critical pedagogy: Spanish for native speakers. Foreign
Language Annals, 38(1), 35-45.

O’Dowd, R. (Ed.). (2016). Online Intercultural Exchange: Policy, Pedagogy, Practice.

Routledge, Taylor & Francis.

O’Dowd, R. (2019). A transnational model of virtual exchange for global citizenship

education.
Language Teaching, 1–14.

Pascual y Cabo, D., Prada, J., & Lowther Pereira, K. (2017). Effects of community service
learning on heritage language learners’ attitudes towards their language and culture. Foreign
Language Annals, 50(1), 71-83.

Philp, J., Adams, R., & Iwashita, N. (2014). Peer Interaction and Second Language
Learning. Routledge.

Sánchez-Muñoz, A. (2016). Heritage language healing? Learners’ attitudes and damage

control in a heritage language classroom. In D. Pascual y Cabo (Ed.), Advances in Spanish as
a heritage language (pp. 205-218). John Benjamins.

Sato, M. (2017). Oral peer corrective feedback: Multiple theoretical perspectives. In H.

Nassaji
& E. Kartchava (Eds.), Corrective feedback in second language teaching and learning (pp.
19– 34). Routledge.

Storch, N. (2002). Patterns of Interaction in ESL Pair Work. Language Learning, 52(1), 119–
158.

88
 Pinillos Chávez, Paloma, The Ohio State University
English-accented Spanish in healthcare: Analyzing trust between Latino patients and
medical professionals
Within the area of Language and Healthcare, it is common to focus on the English
pronunciation of the Spanish speaking patient and how health professionals perceive it. Because
of this, less attention has been paid to how Spanish speaking patients perceive the Spanish
foreign accent of their healthcare providers and how this perception affects the patient-health
professional relation. The current study engages this relation and explores native Spanish
speakers’ perceptions of the Spanish foreign accent of health professionals who communicate
with them about their care.
In this study, I analyze the perception and evaluation of the English-accented Spanish of
healthcare professionals by Latin Americans living in the US. Specifically, I study the relation
between the perception of the foreign accent and the level of reliability participants assign to the
healthcare professional. I base my study on the fact that there is a transfer of L1 (native
language) acoustic cues to the L2 (second language), and that these cues contribute to the
production and perception of a foreign accent. In this study, I considered the transfer of the
aspiration of the English stop consonants to Spanish as the main acoustic cue to analyze.
Specifically, I study the second language Spanish speakers’ VOT to analyze how VOT patterns
influence the perceptions of English-accent Spanish. There are two questions that are discussed
in this study: 1) Is patient trust in their health care provider impacted by the perception of a
foreign accent? And 2) Is there a degree of perceived foreign accent based on English VOT
durations of /p, t, k/?
The results showed that Latin American patients do perceive the English-accented
Spanish of the healthcare professionals and, most importantly, they perceived it based on the
degree of aspiration transferred from the L1 to the L2. The longer the aspiration, the more likely
the participant is to perceive the speaker as non-native. In addition, the patient's trust of the
healthcare professional was impacted by the perception of a foreign accent. Thus, the patient
showed more trust in the healthcare professional that had a more native-like Spanish accent. It
is important to highlight that no negative perceptions towards the English-accented Spanish
were found. Rather, Latin Americans evaluate English-accented Spanish with a more “neutral”
 than a negative attitude.

89
Puma Ninacuri, Christian, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Morfema Kichwa -ka en el Castellano Andino Ecuatoriano: ¿marcador de tópico o foco?
En el Ecuador, el español se ha encontrado en un contacto intenso y prolongado durante
muchos años (Haboud, 1998). Así, la influencia del Kichwa en el español, y viceversa, ha sido
estudiada desde diferentes puntos de vista. Muysken (2019:322) menciona que la influencia del
Kichwa en el Castellano Andino tiene que ver sobre todo con la organización semántica y
pragmática del castellano. A nivel morfológico, el mismo autor menciona que la influencia es
bastante limitada; sin embargo, en el Castellano Andino Ecuatoriano (CAE), una de las
excepciones es el uso del marcador de tópico -ka. Por un lado, este morfema ha sido descrito
como marcador de sujeto en la oración, enfatizador, marcador adversativo, marcador de
tópico/foco, o como una muletilla (Toscano, 1953; Icaza, 1950-1959: Mafla Bustamante, 2004;
Escobar, 2011). Por otro lado, Lipski (2014), en su estudio con bilingües de la zona norte de
Ecuador, menciona que -ka en el CAE cumple la misma función que en Kichwa, es decir, es
usado como topicalizador (assumed information). Sin embargo, el uso de -ka no es exclusiva de
hablantes bilingües, por lo que el uso de este morfema también se da en el discurso de hablantes
monolingües del CAE (1).
1) A: ¿Por qué le amarró a ese gallo?

B: Porque le sigue a contramatar a ese chiquito… ¡Si le safo-ca, madrecita! pero ese
gallo le gana al otro. (Amb_0119DC).
Así, a través de entrevistas sociolingüísticas, el presente estudio busca analizar las
funciones de -ka en el discurso de hablantes monolingües del CAE de la ciudad de Ambato.
Usando como punto de partida investigaciones previas, y tomando como base teórica la
pragmática formal para los conceptos de foco y tópico (Krifka, 2007), en este primer análisis se
puede evidenciar que -ka cumple tanto funciones topicalizadoras como focalizadoras; por lo que
se puede evidenciar que los usos en el CAE se han ampliado por parte de los monolingües.
Referencias

ESCOBAR, A. M. (2011). Spanish in contact with Quechua. In M. Díaz Campos (ed.), The
Handbook of Spanish Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 323-352.
HABOUD, M. (1998). Quichua y castellano en los Andes ecuatorianos: los efectos de un
contacto prolongado. Quito: Abya-Yala
ICAZA, J. (1950-1959). Huasipungo. Juan Mejía Baca & P.L. Lima: Villanueva Editores.
KRIFKA, M. (2007). Basic notions of information structure. In Interdisciplinary studies on
information structure (isis), ed. G. Fanselow C. Fery and Manfred Krifka, volume 6, 13
– 56. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam.
LIPSKI, J. (2014). Syncretic discourse markers in Kichwa-influenced Spanish: Transfer vs.
emergence. Lingua, 151, 216 – 239.
MAFLA BUSTAMANTE, C. (2004). Arí-sí-yes: análisis lingüístico y evaluación de las
traducciones de Huasipungo al inglés. Quito: Abya-Ayala.
MUYSKEN, P. (2019). El kichwa ecuatoriano. Orígenes, riqueza, contactos. Quito: Abya- Yala.
TOSCANO, H. (1953). El español en el Ecuador. Madrid: Ariel.

90
 Mohammad Rafi, Abu Saleh, University of New England, Australia
Translanguaging disruptions in English literature classroom: Perspectives from a
Bangladeshi public university
This study explored the promises of translanguaging as an instructional design to disrupt
the monolingual ideologies of an English literature class and expose students to opportunities
that a multilingual classroom provides for students in a Bangladeshi public university. Through a
two-pronged ethnographic research design, data were collected through classroom observations,
a pedagogical intervention using translanguaging approaches, a focus group discussion with six
students, and an interview with the focal teacher. The study revealed that the students developed
a detailed understanding of the lesson while concurrently developing a critical awareness of their
languaging practices. Applying the critical poststructuralist position of translanguaging theory
(García & Kleyn, 2016) as an analytical framework, this study highlighted the potential of
translanguaging as a teaching tool in terms of disrupting traditional understandings of language,
monolingualism, and traditional bilingualism, purposes of teaching and learning for bilingual
students, traditional content areas, and scripted curricula. Through these disruptions, students’
personal histories, multilingual practices, linguistic and political ideologies, and socio-cultural
identification processes have been explored.

91
 Ramos Pellicia, Michelle & Vanessa Martínez, California State University San Marcos
The Escondido swap meet: A place of covert resistance.
The linguistic landscape refers to the analysis of the use of language/s on texts
displayed in a public space. The analysis takes into consideration the linguistic market and its
diversity as it pertains to the linguistic situation of a country or a region (Cenoz & Gorter 2008;
Landry & Bourhis 1997; Muñoz Carrobles 2010). For the people who create these public
signs, the linguistic landscape serves as a space where they can express our frustrations, ideas,
art, publicity, etc. (Muñoz Carrobles 2010).
In this presentation, we consider the symbolic and informative uses of Spanish in the swap meet
in Escondido. The questions that we address are as follows:
1. Does the vendor have signage in one language or more?

2. What are the languages used?

3. If more than one language appears, in which order do they appear?

4. Do/es the language(s) follow a standard? If not which variety of the language is it?

5. What are the motivations behind the selection of this/these language/s? What is the
intentionality the authors of these signage have in selecting any particular language?

Escondido is a city located north of San Diego County, with Riverside County to the
north, and fifty miles to the south is the border with Mexico. According to the Census (2010),
48.9% of the population in Escondido self-identifies as Latinx. Even when not everyone who is
Latinx participates in this type of exercise and even when not all of those who self-identifies as
Latinx uses Spanish, it is notable that half of the population in Escondido identifies as a member
of this group.
The work discussed in this presentation is the result of numerous ethnographic
observations over the course of two and a half years at different times and days when the swap
meet is opened. In addition to these observations, we also had insight conversations with
vendors and a number of visitors. During this period of time, we collected a total of 200 photos,
and took notes of the music played (e.g. corridos and mariachis) while the swap meetings take
place.
The swap meet in Escondido, better known as “Escondido World Marketplace” was
established on 1980 (40 years ago), and was and for some still is an important way to sustain
immigrants, recent and established, allowing them to find a living in the United States.
Renting a small stall or section at the swap meet is affordable when compared to the rent for
bigger commercial spaces. Because of the type of clientele swap meets serve, it means that
Spanish-speaking business owners and employees can own their business and sell their
merchandise and/or services without having to recur to the use of English. With the use of
signage, most of them homemade (from the bottom-up), the vendors construct a common
linguistic identity that defies the expected use of English, and also at times, questions the
standard set for Spanish. With the combined use of sign and sound, the vendors who are
Spanish-speakers in their majority, establish a common linguistic identity to attract their
Spanish speaker clientele and sustain their language identity.
Spanish is used with multiple intentionalities as a way to inform the public of the services and
products offered, to signal that the seller and customers are Spanish-speaking, but not
necessarily of Mexican descent, and as a tool to (covertly) resist linguistic assimilation. We
92
argue that, under the current political climate, the use of Spanish in signage in the swap meet
has become a space of resistance (Sánchez-Muñoz & Amezcua 2019) where language is used as
a tool/weapon to defy the set expectations that society has about language, be it for the expected
use of English or even of a certain type of the so-called standard Spanish. In this context, the
swap owners create a space where they can use their own linguistic variety, using their
self-determination to create a space where they can become entrepreneurs and use their own
linguistic resources available to them as their linguistic capital (Malinowski 2008).
This work shows the complexity of US Latinx language use in the context of the marketplace
where the vendors reclaim their own linguistic identity for the purposes of marketing their
business, while rejecting conservative linguistic and cultural boundaries (Mendoza-Denton 2016,
Rosa 2016, Zentella 2016). The evidence signals the ethnolinguistic vitality and local prestige
of Spanish in Escondido – a sign of local, authentic, and traditional identity (Carr (forthcoming),
Sebba 2011) and the commodification of language as a way to combat langualessness (Rosa
2016).
Works Consulted

Carr, J.R.C. Forthcoming. Prestige, utility, and evidence of Los Angeles Vernacular Spanish in
the linguistic landscape of Southeast Los Angeles. Rumbos y raíces. Editor: Belén Villareal.

Cenoz, J. and Gorter, D. 2008. El estudio del paisage lingüistico, on-line on Hizkunea website
www.euskara.euskadi.net/r59-bpeduki/es/contenidos/informacion/artik22_1_cenoz_08_03/
es_cenoz/artik22_1_cenoz_08_03.html

Census. 2010. Census. 2010. Escondido (city) California. State and County Quick Facts.
<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0622804.html>

Landry, Rodrigue & Richard Bourhis. 1997. Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality:
an empirical study, in Journal of Language and Social Psychology, vol. 16, pp. 23-49.

Malinowski, D. 2008. Authorship in the linguistic Landscape: a multimodal-performative

view, in: Shohamy, Eleana Goldbert, and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the
Scenery. New York: Routledge.

Mendoza,-Denton, Norma. 2016. Norteño and Sureño Gangs, Hip Hop, and Ethnicity on
YouTube. Localism in California through Spanish Accent Variation. In: H. Samy Alim, John
R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball (eds.) Raciolinguistics. How Language Shapes our Ideas about
Race. Oxford University Press.

Muñoz Carrobles, Diego. 2010. Breve itinerario por el paisaje lingüístico de Madrid. In:
Ángulo Recto. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural, vol. 2, núm. 2, pp. 103-
109. http://www.ucm.es/info/angulo/volumen/Volumen02-2/varia04.htm. ISSN: 1989-4015.

Rosa, Jonathan. 21016. From Mock Spanish to Inverted Spanglish. In: H. Samy Alim, John
R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball (eds.) Raciolinguistics. How Language Shapes our Ideas about
Race. Oxford University Press.

Rosa, Jonathan. 2016. Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race. Raciolinguistic
Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. New York: Oxford University Press.
93
Sánchez-Muñoz, Ana & Angélica Amezcua. 2019. Spanish as a Tool of Latinx Resistance
against Repression in a Hostile Political Climate. Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts,
and Cultures. Vol.3.No.2.pp.59-76.

Sebba, M. 2010. Discourses in Transit, in A. Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds), Semiotic
landscapes. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Zentella, Ana Celia. 2016. Socials, Poch@s, Normals y los demás. School Networks and
Linguistic Capital of High School Students on the Tijuana-San Diego Border. In: H. Samy
Alim, John R. Rickford and Arnetha F. Ball (eds.) Raciolinguistics. How Language Shapes
 our Ideas about Race. Oxford University Press.

94
Ready, Carol, University of Oklahoma
Identity in crisis: Asserting Moroccanness through stories of struggle

The Plan de inmigración de la comunidad de Madrid 2019-2021, a policy developed

and written by the by the Autonomous Community of Madrid's Counsel on Immigration to put
forth measures on the integration of immigrants, refers to the notion of “crisis of identity,”
which it defines as identity confusion brought on by the maintenance of cultural and linguistic
practices of family members who migrated to Spain (p. 38). Moroccans in Spain are framed as
experiencing a "crisis of identity" and are characterized as “unassimilables” (Bravo López,
2004). In this way, they are racialized and socially marked (Mijares Molina, 2006; Rogozen-
Soltar, 2017).
In this presentation, I examine how 30 first and 28 second generation members of the
Moroccan community position themselves in relation to the concept of "identity crisis" in
discourse. Specifically, I identified small stories from 95 hours of sociolinguistic interview
data. I transcribed and analyzed the small stories using De Fina's (2013, p. 43) three levels of
positionality which examine the way individuals position themselves in relation to one another,
vis-à-vis their interlocutors, and with regards to dominant discourses.
Speakers position themselves as authority figures on appropriate ways of being and belonging in
Spanish society as a Moroccan. In the small stories of struggle, speakers discuss the notion of a
crisis of identity which is provoked by rejecting family origins and cultural ties.
Through their positioning in small stories, speakers make evident that only way for this
crisis to be resolved is by accepting and assuming a multicultural and multilingual identity. This
contradicts the premise that cultural and linguistic maintenance is a problem, which is behind
the notion of a crisis of identity as described in the policy mentioned above. However,
considering their contested and racialized presence, these multicultural and multilingual
identities that are presented as a solution to the crisis of identity, include new ways of being that
are socially accepted within the dominant society (i.e. adopting Spanish identity through legal
frameworks and some language practices). In this analysis, I argue that in retelling other's
struggles for belonging, Moroccans demonstrate and perform their belonging as members of
various communities.

Bravo López, F. (2004). El Musulmán como Alter-ego Irreductible: La Expansión del

Discurso Culturalista. In B. López García and M. Berriane (eds.), Atlas de la
Inmigración Marroquí en España. Taller de Estudios Internacionales Mediterráneos (pp.
433-437).
Madrid: UA Ediciones.
De Fina, A. (2013). Positioning level 3. Connecting local identity displays to macro
social processes. Narrative Inquiry 23:1 (2013), 40–61.
Mijares Molina, L. (2006). Aprendiendo a Ser Marroquíes. Inmigración, Diversidad
Lingü.stica y Escuela. Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo.
Rogozen-Soltar, M. (2017). Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam.
Indiana University Press: Bloomington.
 

95
Rockey, Catherine, University of Arizona
Language Alternation in Text Message-Based Interactions: A sequential analysis of
(dis)alignment strategies
This study analyzes the language alternation (LA) practices of five young New York
Latino bilinguals in their text message-based interactions, extracted from the Bilingual Youth
Texts Corpus (BYTs) (McSweeney, 2016). I aim to explore the role that LA plays in the
organizational structure of these interactions, focusing on the conversational strategy
of (dis)alignment and two related strategies, (dis)affiliation and language accommodation
(/nonreciprocation). This study draws upon the interactional approach (e.g., Auer, 1988; Wei
2002) as well as Moyer (1998)’s 3-tier model of organizational structure of bilingual interaction
to qualitatively analyze the LA found in the BYTs corpus. A turn-by-turn sequential approach,
grounded in local meaning making, shows that participants use LA to select or accommodate
main language choice and negotiate inter-turn language choices in order to (dis)align structurally
and/or (dis)affiliate emotionally. The individual differences in the employment of these
strategies are discussed in terms of community membership, language attitudes and individual
stylistic choices. In addition, these results present implications to the connection between
bilingual proficiency and LA practices of US Latinos.

 Rodríguez Tembrás, Vanesa, Heidelberg University

Seven Minutes for a Diagnosis: Code-switching as a Communicative Strategy in Bilingual
Medical Consultations
In the public health system in Galicia (Spain) the law only allows family doctors seven
minutes per medical consultation. In this short timeframe, the patient must provide a detailed
description of their symptoms and the doctor will have to examine the patient and offer an
accurate diagnosis. Additionally, both doctors and patients in that short time usually intend to
build a relationship of trust.
In Galicia where there are two official languages, patients are allowed by law to choose
their preferred language of use with the doctor: Galician or Spanish. As has mentioned before
the allotted time for consultation, 7 minutes, seems too short more so in bilingual situations. As
a matter of fact, consultations do go overtime, and codeswitching also happens.
In this presentation, I analyze code-switching at the doctor’s office in a location in
Galicia where the population is bilingual, but tends to be dominant in Galician. As Spanish in
this area is still considered the language of prestige, it is associated with health-related talk. The
dataset of this study contains 587 audio recorded consultations of 6 different family doctors (de
Oliveira and Hernández Flores, 2014). I study codeswitching in the medical consultations from a
sociopragmatic perspective (Bravo, 1999) and in relation to facework and the length of the
consultation. For the analysis, I first classified all the instances of codeswitching and the
facework functions served. I also quantified the length of interactions dividing them into short vs
long consultations.
The results of the analysis showed that both doctors and patients may initiate code-
switching and it occurred in approximately 25% of the consultations. Likewise, code- switching
was used in both short and long consultations, indicating a multifunctionality not related to time
constraints. Finally, it was found that code-switching was employed to
facilitate comprehension, as well as to mitigate possible face threats to build a more relaxed
atmosphere to talk and build trust.

96
References

Auer, P. (ed.) (1998). Code-Switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity.

London: Routledge.
Bravo, D. (1999). ¿Imagen positiva vs. Imagen negativa?: pragmática socio-cultural y
componentes de face. Oralia. Análisis del discurso oral, 2, pp. 155-184.
IGE (Instituto Galego de Estatística): Coñecemento e uso do galego. [online] Available at:
<https://www.ige.eu/> [Accessed 20 June 2020].
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Mondada L. (2007). Bilingualism and the Analysis of Talk at Work: Code-Switching as a
Resource for the Organization of Action and Interaction. In: Heller M. (eds) Bilingualism: A
Social Approach. Palgrave Advances in Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Odebunmi, A. (2010). Code selection at first meetings: a pragmatic analysis of doctor-client
conversations in Nigeria. InLiSt, 48, 1-41.
Oliveira de, S.M. and Hernández Flores, N. (2014). Corpus de interacción médico-paciente en
Galicia.
University of Copenhagen (514- 0033/194000), unpublished.
Singo, J. (2014). Code-switching in doctor-patient communication. Nawa: journal of language
and communication, 8(1), 48-57.
Wei, L. (ed.) (2005). Special Issue: Conversational Code-Switching. Journal of Pragmatics 37:
275–410. Wood, N. (2018). Departing from doctor-speak: a perspective on Code- Switching in
the medical setting. J Gen Intern Med, 34 (3), pp. 464-466.

97
  Rogers, Brandon, Texas Tech University
Mauricio, Figueroa, Universidad de Concepción
Dario Fuentes, University of Bristol
Evidence of dialectal divergence in the vowel system of Chilean Spanish
There is ample consensus that Chilean Spanish constitutes a very distinct dialect of
Spanish, distinguishable from all other variants of the same language (Canfield 1962, Hualde
2014, Moreno 2018). This is not because its characteristics are all unique to it, (although some
are according to Sadowsky 2015) but rather because of the particular combination of these traits,
and their frequency of use (Lipski 1994). In terms of internal variation, and specifically at the
phonetic level, there is also agreement that most variation is not explained by geographical
factors (e.g., Soto-Barba at al. 2015,), but by other social variables such as rurality (Soto-Barba
2007), level of education (e.g., Borland Delorme 2004), and socioeconomic status (e.g.,
Salamanca Gutiérrez & Valverde San Martín 2009).
Given the important sociolectal differences within Chilean Spanish, there has been a
strong interest amongst researchers with respect to the nature of its internal variation, and the
social variables governing it (e.g. Carrasco 1974, Valdivieso 1983 among others). The
resulting body of research paints a clear picture: in Chilean Spanish there is strong evidence of
diverse variation at the phonetic level driven by social factors. Likewise, this variation seems
to disproportionally affect the consonant system; and listeners seem to be aware of much of
this variation (Author 2013).
In this study, we specifically examine the Chilean Spanish vowel system and if it
reveals further evidence of the types of dialectal divergence previously documented in the
consonantal system of Chilean Spanish. In order to do so, 6203 vowels tokens were obtained
from a stratified corpus of sociolinguistic interviews made up of 30 speakers (13 female, 17
male) from the southern-central city of Concepción in Chile’s Bío-Bío región. Separate linear
mixed models were built to evaluate the effect of the fixed factors vowel category,
socioeconomic status (SES), lexical stress and age group on the normalized values of F1 and
F2, using the lmer function in the lmerTest package in R (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff &
Christensen 2017). Interactions were also tested to understand the relationships the variables
had with one another. The quantitative analyses revealed that, indeed, different socio-
economic groups display significantly different but also cohesive types of variation in their
vowel system, and that young speakers from lower socio-economic groups seem to be leading
processes of change. Specifically, speakers from lower socioeconomic strata tend to front /i/
and /e/ more than those belonging to more affluent socioeconomic strata, which we consider
to be preliminary evidence of continued dialectal divergence in the vowel system of Chilean
 
Spanish.
Selected references

Borland Delorme, K. E. (2004). La variación y distribución alofónica en el habla culta de

Santiago de Chile. Onomázein 10, 103-115.

Canfield, D. L. (1962). La pronunciación del español en América. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y

Cuervo.
Hualde, J. I. (2014). The Sounds of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2017). “lmerTest Package: Tests in
Linear Mixed Effects Models.” Journal of Statistical Software 82(13), 1–26.

Salamanca Gutiérrez, G. F., & Valverde San Martín, A. L. (2009). Prestigio y estigmatización en
98
 variantes anteriorizadas y posteriorizadas de las vocales del español de Chile.
Literatura y lingüística 20, 125-140.

Soto-Barba, J. (2007). Variación del F1 y del F2 en las vocales del español urbano y rural de la
provincia de Ñuble. RLA. Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada 45(2), 143-165.

Valdivieso, H. (1983). Prestigio y estigmatización: factor determinante en la enseñanza

institucionalizada de la lengua materna. RLA. Revista de Lingüística Teórica y
 Aplicada 21, 137-142.

99
Román, Miguel, University of New Mexico
The Linguistic Landscape of Latin America in Mie Prefecture Román,
Linguistic landscape being a relatively new method of researching ideologies, the aim of
this current investigation is to apply previous methodologies of linguistic landscape analysis to
better understand the linguistic positioning of Japanese heritage speakers of minority languages,
specifically Spanish and Portuguese, in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Previous studies in linguistic
landscaping (Masai, 1972; Someya, 2002; Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Backhaus, 2007) identify the
way that language is used to represent language ideologies in their environment, and how
geography plays a role in this representation. Primarily focusing on methodologies defined in
Franco-Rodríguez (2009), this study analyzes data from 5 regional cities with high populations of
Latin American residents, based on census data reported by the Mie Prefectural Government
(2017). Due to the sparse usage of non-Japanese language within the majority of Japan, areas with
a large foreign population (such as near non-Japanese religious centers and non-Japanese oriented
foreign markets) were identified and data was collected within a 1-kilometer radius. The initial
findings of this analysis indicate that the community is relatively robust and ethnolinguistically
active, but also that these languages are not seen with the same prestige as other foreign
languages in Japan. This is also apparent in the geographic location of these communities, where
data was collected, and how accessible they are via general modes of transportation. These
findings demonstrate how the linguistic landscape may indicate signs of social struggle, and the
importance of investigation in lesser known heritage speaker groups.

Works Cited
Backhaus, P. (2007). Linguistic Landscapes : A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in
Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Franco-Rodríguez, J. (2009). Interpreting the Linguistic Traits of Linguistic Landscapes as
Ethnolinguistic Vitality: Methodological Approach. Asociación Española de Lingüística
Aplicada, AESLA.
Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An
empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X970161002
Masai, Y. (1972) Tōkyō no seikatsu chizu [Living Map of Tokyo]. Tokyo: Jiji Tsūshinsha. Mie
Prefectural Government, 三重県環境⽣活部ダイバーシティ社会推進課 (December, 2017).
平成 30 年 12 ⽉ 31 ⽇現在分 (1-6). Retrieved from
http://www.pref.mie.lg.jp/common/content/000819940.pdf
Someya, H. (2002) Kanban no moji hyo ̄ki [Writing on signs]. In Y. Tobita and T. Satō(eds)
Gendai nihongo kōza dai 6 kan: moji hyōki[Modern Japanese CourseVol. 6: Letters and
Writing] (pp. 221–43). Tokyo: Meijishoin.
 

100
Ross, Daniel, University of California, Riverside
Linguistics online: Teaching Morphology via linguistic diversity during the pandemic
This timely presentation will report on teaching Morphology online during Summer 2020,
with a focus on bringing language description to students remotely so that they can experience
not just studying but doing Linguistics first-hand. I am an early-career scholar who previously
taught this course with traditional lectures, reading one chapter per week, with exams to assess
student learning. This time will be different in two substantial ways. First, it will be online, over
an intensive 5-week period during the month of August, with 8 hours of class meetings per
week. I will introduce the class to the students as a combination of a Morphology boot camp and
a Linguistics summer camp. Second, the course is designed to bring Linguistics alive for the
students, taking advantage of—not just accommodating—the required online format during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the class will be designed to connect students to languages
and linguists around the world.
There is a growing divide between undergraduate instruction and the need to have
experience with research when applying to graduate programs. There is also an ongoing shift
from traditional, descriptive approaches to studying Linguistics, toward abstract theoretical
topics, as also often reflected in courses and textbooks for undergraduates. From this
perspective, it is important to remember the foundations of our field: “While there is a long
tradition of linguistic fieldwork in North America… fieldwork-based dissertations are
sometimes discouraged as being ‘too descriptive’, or as being insufficiently informed by
theory” (Crowley 2007:12). Because field methods courses and hands-on experience are even
rarer for undergraduates, they may not be aware of the vast array of language data upon which
theories are built. This highlights the need for students to experience languages, not just
language, motivating a course framed around descriptive linguistics, with a term project where,
working in groups to facilitate connectedness during this isolating time, students will compare
the morphology of indigenous languages around the world based on descriptive grammars,
along with trying basic field methods. Before students can fully appreciate linguistic theory, we
show them the world through the eyes of a linguist (Levin 1983). In a survey of online teaching
methods for Linguistics, Babcock et al. (2015) concluded:
“We suggest that teachers develop and emphasize two important strategies—time
management and communication—throughout the course. As online teachers know, it is
frustrating when students are not in regular communication, either by phone or email, and
one great frustration is students who do not turn in work on time.” (Babcock et al.
2015:492)

Having now experienced online instruction during Spring 2020, I am sure we can all relate
to that sentiment. Despite the limitations of online instruction, real-time video technology
introduces a critical advantage: the ability for anyone, anywhere in the world to join class
meetings. For these reasons, my course will bring guest morphologists and fieldworkers for
presentations, and speakers of languages for elicitation practice. Grading will be based on
participation, focusing on learning outcomes via experience. This talk will consider the
effectiveness of that approach.

References:
Babcock, Rebecca Day, Elizabeth Bilbrey McMellon & Sailaja Athyala. 2015. Teaching
online courses in linguistics. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30(4). 481–494.
https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqu039

101
Crowley, Terry. 2007. Field Linguistics: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levin, Nancy S. 1983. Teaching linguistics to non-linguistics majors. IULC Working Papers
17(4). 129–134. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/iulcwp/article/view/26023

102
  Sánchez-Alvarado, Covadonga, Winona State University
Approaching cross-linguistic analyses of intonation: American English vs. Peninsular
Spanish
Languages use intonation to convey a variety of meanings, including information
structure (e.g. focus) or sentence type (e.g. statement vs. question). Within the Autosegmental-
Metrical framework (Pierrehumbert, 1980), a combination of labels (namely L for low and H for
high) and diacritics are used to describe tonal movements produced on specific anchoring points:
stressed syllables in content words (pitch accents) and the edge of intonational phrases (boundary
tones). This approach derived in the creation of language-specific annotation systems, the Tones
and Breaks Indices (ToBI) systems, which provide the tools to identify the phonological
categories within a given language’s grammar. These systems have been created and developed
for American English, MAE_ToBI (Beckman & Hirschberg, 1994; Beckman, Hirschberg, &
Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2005; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990), and for Spanish, Sp_ToBI
(Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2009; Jose Ignacio Hualde & Prieto, 2015; Prieto & Roseano, 2010)
and while they have been productive in the development of more concrete research on the use of
intonation in these two languages, they are not very informative for cross-linguistic analyses,
because the same movement may be described with two different labels and vice versa, (Hualde
& Prieto, 2016). The ability to establish comparisons, however, is important in order to further
develop research on language acquisition and language contact situations. What is the best way to
approach this issue? In this presentation, two methods will be discussed: the use of already
established ToBI systems along with a phonetic analysis of each pitch accent, and theuse of
automatic transcription tools.
The analysis focuses on the pitch accents used on the subject of utterances produced in
three discourse contexts: broad focus, informational subject focus, and corrective subject
focus, since the use intonational strategies to convey differences in focus has been attested both
in American English (Arvaniti & Garding, 2007; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990) and
Peninsular Spanish (Gabriel, 2006; Vanrell & Fernández-Soriano, 2018). In order to compare
the intonational strategies used, the data needs to be comparable. Speech was elicited from
native speakers of Peninsular Spanish (12) and American English (12) using contextualized
question- answer pairs. The same sentence structure (SVO) and the same names were used
across utterances. For the first type of analysis, the intonational contours were labelled
manually following Sp_ToBI and MAE_ToBI conventions and values for two acoustic
correlates: pitch scaling (the difference between the highest and the lowest F0 value within the
tonal movement) and peak alignment (the distance from the highest F0 point to the end of the
stressed syllable).
For the second type of analysis, utterances were automatically labelled using the tool
Eti_ToBI (Elvira-García, Roseano, Fernández-Planas, & Martínez-Celdrán, 2016) using Praat
(Boersma & Weenink, 2019).
The combination of a phonological and a phonetic analysis provides a fine-grained
description of differences across languages but reveals how similar tonal movements are
labelled differently (see figure 1), which can be misleading for cross-linguistic comparisons.
The use of automated annotation provides more direct comparisons but fails to draw
generalizations based on meaning, needed to account for the phonological value of these tonal
movements. While manual annotations are bound to be inaccurate due to human error, the
researcher needs to be extremely careful with the quality and nature of the speech signal to rely
on automatic transcription tools. All these factors need to be considered when approaching the
analysis of intonation in non-standard contexts.

103
 Figure 1. Acoustic features (pitch scaling and alignment) as manifested on the manually
labelled pitch accents for Peninsular Spanish and American English speakers.
References
Arvaniti, A., & Garding, G. (2007). Dialectal variation in the rising accents of American
English. In J. Cole & J. I. Hualde (Eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology IX: Change in
Phonology (pp. 547– 576). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Beckman, M. E., & Hirschberg, J. (1994). The ToBI annotation conventions.
Beckman, Mary E., Hirschberg, J., & Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (2005). The original ToBI
system and the evolution of the ToBI framework. In S.-A. Jun (Ed.), Prosodic Typology:
The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing (pp. 9–54). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2019). Praat: doing phonetics by computer.
Retrieved from http://www.praat.org/
Elvira-García, W., Roseano, P., Fernández-Planas, A. M., & Martínez-Celdrán, E. (2016).
A tool for automatic transcription of intonation: Eti_ToBI a ToBI transcriber for
Spanish and Catalan.
Language Resources and Evaluation, 50(4), 767–792. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-015-
9320-9 Estebas-Vilaplana, E., & Prieto, P. (2009). La notación prosódica del español: una
revisión del Sp_ToBI.
Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 17, 264–283.
Gabriel, C. (2006). Focal pitch accents and subject positions in Spanish: Comparing close-to-
standard varieties and Argentinean Porteño. In Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden,
Germany.
Hualde, J.I., & Prieto, P. (2016). Towards an International Prosodic Alphabet (IPrA).
Laboratory Phonology, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.11
Hualde, Jose Ignacio, & Prieto, P. (2015). Intonational Variation in Spanish: European and
American varieties. In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonational variation in Romance (pp.
350–391). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pierrehumbert, J. (1980). The Phonetics and Phonology of English Intonation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Dissertation.
Pierrehumbert, J., & Hirschberg, J. (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the
interpretation of discourse. In P. R. Cohen, J. L. Morgan, & M. E. Pollack (Eds.),
Intentions in communication (pp. 271–311). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Prieto, P., & Roseano, P. (2010). Transcription of Intonation of the Spanish Language.
Munich: Lincom Europa.
Vanrell, M. del M., & Fernández-Soriano, O. (2018). Language variation at the prosody-syntax
interface: Focus in European Spanish. In M. Uth & M. García (Eds.), Focus Realization
and Interpretation in Romance and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
104
  Sanz, Israel; West Chester University
Language contact in the written mode as an ecological process: Spanish loanwords in
colonial Nahuatl
 
Language contact settings have historically operated as prime sites for the negotiation of
orthographic norms. Insofar as written language is a part of the linguistic repertoire of a
community, written practices are also a site for language contact in their own right, and one may
thus speak of language contact in the written mode (Guerini 2019). Starting from this basic
premise, the goal of this presentation is two-fold: to propose a historical sociolinguistic
approach (Auer et al. 2015) to the study of historical orthographies in language contact
situations, and (b) to tentatively explore the possibilities of an ecological framework (Barton
1994; Lüpke 2011; Mufwene 2018) to the study of historical orthographies in contact settings,
by considering spelling norms as a reflection of multiple, simultaneous linguistic and cultural
environmental forces.
This framework will be illustrated by means of a case study of the emergence of
orthographic norms in a high-contact environment: the development of spelling protocols in
Colonial Nahuatl and the application of these protocols to Spanish loanwords. Data will be
extracted from a Colonial Nahuatl corpus of some 500 Spanish loanwords (1540s-1790s),
obtained from Karttunen and Lockhart (1976). Although this source is a classical work on the
contact between Spanish and Nahuatl, its materials have never been used in the study of the
historical orthography of Colonial Nahuatl. The focus of this case study will be on the Colonial
Nahuatl reflexes of the following three features of Spanish: (a) plosives (e.g., telciobero
‘velvet’ < Sp. terciopelo); (b) labiodental /f/ (e.g., bleco ‘fringe, flounce’ < Sp. fleco); and (c)
the use of non- etymological nasals (see Lockhart 1992 ‘intrusive nasality’) (e.g., fanblican
‘building’ < Sp. fábrica). The diachronic analysis of the spellings illustrates several historical
ecological factors, including the scribes’ knowledge of the phonology of colonial Spanish,
various degrees of motivation to conform to canonical Spanish spelling, and the progressive
development of norms for alphabetic writing in Nahuatl.
Overall, it will be argued that European-based writing traditions were modified under
the influence of traditional modes of communication to operate within the changing
sociolinguistic ecology of colonial Mexico. In turn, this process exemplifies the interface
between linguistic, social, and cultural effects typical of contact environments, and it illustrates
the potential of an ecological approach to the study of historical orthographies in other
language contact settings.

Works
  cited
Auer, Anita, Peersman, Catharina, Pickl, Simon, Rutten, Gijsbert and Vosters, Rik. 2015.
‘Historical sociolinguistics: the field and its future’, Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 1: 1-
12.
Barton, David. 1994. Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language.
London: Blackwell.
Guerini, Federica. 2019. ‘Orthography and graphemics,’ in Darquennes, Jeroen, Salmons,
Joseph and Vandenbussche, Wim (eds.), Language Contact: An International Handbook,
Volume 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 76-88.
Karttunen, Frances, and James Lockhart. 1976. Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language
Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
105
Lockhart, James. 1992. The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the
Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Lüpke, Friederike. 2011. ‘Orthography development’, in Austin, Peter and Sallabank, Jullia
(eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 312-36.
Mufwene, Salikoko. 2018. ‘Language evolution from an ecological perspective’, in Fill, Alwin
and Penz, Hermine (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. New York: Routledge, pp.
73-88.

106
  Schmidt, Lauren San Diego State University
L2 processing of Spanish dialectal phonetic variation in the “at-home” and study abroad
contexts
 Previous research has found that unfamiliar regional and social varieties of the language
may have an effect on comprehension, for both native and nonnative listeners (e.g., Eisenstein
& Berkowitz, 1981; Major et al., 2005), and that variable sounds may be perceived and
processed differently according to the listener’s native variety (e.g., Evans & Iverson, 2004;
Sumner & Samuel, 2009). However, increased familiarity with dialectal speech may lead to
lessening effects of variation on speech comprehension, even for second language (L2) listeners
(Tauroza & Luk, 1997). Furthermore, exposure to specific regional varieties has been found –
in some cases – to lead to changes in how some regional sounds are perceived (e.g., Escudero &
Boersma, 2004; Baker & Smith, 2010). The current study explores how observed improvements
in intelligibility and perceived comprehensibility (Derwing & Munro, 1997) of dialectal speech
by L2 listeners may be attributed to changes in how dialectal phones are processed.
Specifically, the study investigates the effects of regional and social phonological variation on
L2 speech processing for L2 learners in a traditional “at-home” context versus those learners
exposed to variation via a study abroad experience, in terms of:

lexical activation (Is the intended lexical item activated and/or comprehended?)
processing costs (How does the presence of variable sounds affect processing time?)

A Lexical Decision Task was administered to three groups of listeners: (1) 20

English-speaking university students of Spanish enrolled in Spanish courses in the U.S.
Midwest, (2) 23 English- speaking university students participating in a five-week summer
study abroad program in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and (3) 18 native speakers of Buenos Aires
Spanish. Listeners heard both Spanish nonce and real words with dialectal Argentine and
standard phones and were asked to indicate whether each item heard was a Spanish word. The
target conditions included (a) the standard full sibilant-/s/ (basta [basta]) and dialectal
aspirated-/s/ (pasta [pahta]), and (b) the palatal fricative [ʝ] (playa [plaʝa]) and the Argentine
assibilated palatal [ʃ] (mayo [maʃo]).
Reaction time latencies and word judgment accuracies were analyzed according to:
language background (L2 group, native group), exposure (at-home group, study abroad group),
phonetic feature (standard [s, ʝ], dialectal [h, ʃ]), and lexical status of the stimulus (real, nonce).
Findings from the data analysis revealed an effect of the dialectal variants on processing
the real word (but not the nonce) stimuli for the L2 listener group. Slower L2 reaction times and
less accurate lexical decision judgments were observed for (a) items with the dialectal
aspirated-/s/ as opposed to the full sibilant /s/ variant, as well as for (b) items with the dialectal
assibilated palatal variant [ʃ] over items with the more widespread palatal fricative form [ʝ] for
the at-home learners. Meanwhile, the presence of the dialectal variants did not affect accuracy
in lexical decision judgments for the study abroad group, although it did result in greater
processing costs (longer reaction times) even by the end of the five-week program. Findings
from the study reveal that there may be processing costs for L2 listeners when listening to
speech characterized by unfamiliar regional or social/stylistic variants but that those costs may
lessen with sufficient exposure (dialect contact).

107
References

Baker, W. & L. C. Smith. 2010. The impact of L2 dialect on learning French vowels: Native
English speakers learning Quebecois and European French. The Canadian Modern
Language Review, 66(5), 711-738.
Derwing, T. M. & M. J. Munro. 1997. Accent, intelligibility, and comprehensibility: Evidence
from four L1s. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 1-16.
Eisenstein, M. & D. Berkowitz. 1981. The effect of phonological variation on adult learner
comprehension.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 4, 75-80.
Escudero, P. & P. Boersma. 2004. Bridging the gap between L2 speech perception research and
phonological theory. SSLA, 26, 551-585.
Evans, B. G. & P. Iverson. 2004. Vowel normalization for accent: An investigation of best
exemplar locations in northern and southern British English sentences. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 115(1), 352-361.
Major, R. C., S. M. Fitzmaurice, F. Bunta & C. Balasubramanian. 2005. Testing the effects of
regional, ethnic, and international dialects of English on listening comprehension.
Language Learning, 55(1), 37-69.
Sumner, M. & A. G. Samuel. 2009. The effect of experience on the perception and
representation of dialect variants. Journal of Memory & Language, 60(4), 487-501.
Tauroza, S. & J. Luk. 1997. Accent and second language listening comprehension. RELC
Journal, A Journal of Language Teaching and Research in Southeast Asia, 28, 54-71.

108
   Sequeros-Valle, José, University of Illinois at Chicago
Bilingualism under a morphological approach to discourse
 
The goal of this project is to explore the implications of a morphological approach to
discourse (Author, in progress) for the ongoing discussion on bilingualism at the
discourse-syntax interface (e.g. Author et al., accepted-a, accepted-b; Montrul & Polinsky, 2011;
Sorace, 2011). Namely, this study focuses on the discursive restrictions of clitic-doubled left
dislocation as an anaphoric construction (CLLD, see example (1b)) and focus fronting as a
contrastive construction (FF, see example (2b)). In sum, anaphoricity is correlated to clitic-
doubling (as in (1)) and the lack of anaphoricity is correlated to the lack of clitic-doubling (as in
(2)).
On a first line of discussion on the acquisition of the above test case by bilinguals, some
authors have predicted bilingual divergence at this interface, both at the competence level (e.g.
Benmamoun et al., 2013; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006) and the processing level (e.g. Mountrul &
Polinksy, 2011; Sorace, 2011). However, these hypotheses have been challenged via
acceptability judgment task (Leal Mendez et al., 2015; Slabakova et al., 2012) and via self-
paced reading task (Leal et al., 2017). However, Author et al. (accepted-a, accepted-b) have
found evidence of bilingual divergence in a production task. This pattern – convergence in an
acceptability task, convergence in an online task, and divergence in a production task – is
similar to is found in other domain that is purely syntactic: L2 gender (Grüter et al., 2012).
Therefore, it looks like the issues at the discourse-syntax interface may be production issues
well beyond the interfaces.
On a second line of discussion, I have argued (Author, in progress) that discourse
features are morphemes from numeration included in morphosyntax as functional heads. Under
my model, a discourse-feature (e.g. [+contrast] ) merges to the target constituent (see example
(3)). When fronting does take place, which I consider it to be optional, there is an additional step
in which an unvalued featured in C leads the now marked constituent to raise to the left
periphery (see example (4)). In these two syntactic trees, [+x] would be the [+contrast],
[+anaphora], or [+promotion] feature. On a later stage, native speakers externalize [+contrast] as
emphatic contrastive stress and [+anaphora] and [+promotion] as clitic-doubling.
Taking these two separate discussions into account, I argue that bilingual divergence at
the discourse-syntax interface is due to a production-specific issue (see first discussion) on the
externalization of discourse features (see second discussion). For example, L1 English – L2
Spanish bilinguals already create anaphoric relations in their L1 English (see example (5)).
However, it is the phonological externalization of the [+anaphora] feature as clitic-doubling in
their L2 Spanish that creates divergence performance. My claim aligns with previous research on
bilingualism: For example, the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Montrul, 2018; Slabakova, 2014) argues
that functional morphology is the source of bilingual divergence, or the Gradient/Categorical
Competence Hypothesis (Duffield, 2005; Slabakova et al., 2011) argues that bilinguals tend to
produce more categorical output in instances in which controls produce more gradient output. In
sum, this new theoretical approach can provide a general explanation of divergence beyond the
interfaces.
 Examples

(1) a. - ¿Dónde ves [ANTECEDENT a tus

amigos]? Where see.2nd DOM your friends
‘Where do you see your friends?’
b. – [ANAPHORIC A Pedro] [CLITIC-DOUBLING lo] veo en el parque, y a María en casa.
109
 DOM Pedro Cl. veo.1st in the park and DOM Maria in house ‘I see
Pedro at the park, and Maria at home.’

(2) a. – Viste [ANTECEDENT a Miguel],

¿no? see.2nd.past DOM Miguel no ‘You
saw Miguel, didn’t you?’
b. – [NON-ANAPHORIC A PEDRO] [NO LITIC-DOUBLING] vi.
DOM Pedro see.1st.past
‘I saw Pedro (not Miguel).’

(3)

(4)

(5) a. - ‘Where do you see [ANTECEDENT your friends] ?’

b. - ‘I see [ANAPHORIC Pedro] at the park, and [ANAPHORIC Maria] at home.

References

Author (in progress). A morphological approach to discourse in Spanish: A theoretical and

experimental review. Unpublished dissertation.
Author et al. (accepted-a). Clitic-doubled left dislocation in L2 Spanish: The effect of processing
load at the syntax-discourse interface. Language Acquisition.
Author et al. (accepted-b). Clitic-doubled left dislocation in heritage Spanish: Judgment vs.
speeded production data. Languages.
Benmamoun, E., Montrul, S., & Polinsky, M. (2013). Heritage languages and their speakers:
Opportunities and challenges for linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics, 39(3/4), 129–181.
Duffield, N. (2005). Implications of competent gradience. Moderne Sprachen, 48(1), 95-117.
Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or
a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research 28(2), 191-215.
Leal Méndez, T., Rothman, J., & Slabakova, R. (2015). Discourse-sensitive clitic-doubled
110
 dislocations in heritage Spanish. Lingua, 155, 85–97.
Leal, T., Slabakova, R., & Farmer, T.A. (2017). The fine-tuning of linguistic expectations over
the course of L2 learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 39(3), 493-525.
Montrul, S. (2018). The Bottleneck Hypothesis extends to heritage language acquisition.
Meaning and Structure in Second Language Acquisition: In honor of Roumyana
Slabakova, 55, 149- 179.
Montrul, S. & Polinsky, M. (2011). Why not heritage speakers? Linguistic Approaches to
Bilingualism, 1(1), 58–62.
Slabakova, R. (2014). The bottleneck of second language acquisition. Foreign Language
Teaching and Research, 46(4), 543-559.
Slabakova, R., Rothman, J., & Kempchinsky, P. (2011). Gradient competence at the syntax-
discourse interface. EuroSLA Yearbook, 11(1), 218-243.
Slabakova, R., Kempchinsky, P., & Rothman, J. (2012). Clitic-doubled left dislocation and focus
fronting in L2 Spanish: A case of successful acquisition at the syntax-discourse interface.
Second Language Research 28(3), 319-343.
Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of ‘interface’ in bilingualism. Linguistic
Approaches to Bilingualism 1(1), 1-33.
Sorace, A. & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second
Language Research, 22(3), 339-368.

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 Severinkangas, Eija Sandra, University of Rhode Island
Situación de paisaje lingüístico bilingüe en Pawtucket, Rhode Island
El propósito de este trabajo fue explorar la evolución en la definición de paisaje
lingüístico, cuál es su unidad de análisis y su metodología. También se exploró qué tipo de
estudios se han llevado a cabo que abarquen la situación de la lengua española en una situación
de lenguas en contacto en algunas áreas de España y en los Estados Unidos. Tomando tales
estudios de punto de partida, se llevó a cabo un recorrido y un análisis exploratorio de una zona
urbana bilingüe en inglés y en español en Pawtucket, Rhode Island, utilizando una cámara
digital para recolectar datos. Se partió de la hipótesis que existe un paisaje lingüístico bilingüe
en Pawtucket, en específico alrededor del único restaurante latinoamericano de la zona, y que
este paisaje lingüístico es bilingüe en español y en inglés, equitativamente.
Los hallazgos de este estudio exploratorio validan la función informativa mencionada por
Landry y Bourhis donde la lengua marca un territorio de hablantes de una lengua. Sin embargo, la
presencia de las lenguas no es equitativa. Los servicios religiosos tienden a estar comunicados
solamente en español mientras en otros servicios se encontraron diferencias en el contenido entre
una lengua y otra. Un estudio más detallado sobre la proporción y la presencia de cada lengua es
recomendado. También debe estudiarse cómo dicha proporción inequitativa se refleja en la
percepción de identidad etnolingüística y en el nivel de bilingüismo sustractivo de la zona.
 

112
Spier, Troy E. ; Tulane University/ Freie Universität Berlin
Islamophobia, Ideology, and Discourse Analysis in Ecuadorian Social Media: “Which Day is
the Class on Car Bombs and Rewards for Killing Christians?”
Although it has been repeatedly suggested in western media coverage that the countries of
Latin America are covert breeding grounds for Muslim extremism, there is no substantive
evidence to support this imagined threat (cf. Ozkan 2017). On the contrary, Catholicism is so
widespread that the estimated current and future Muslim population across the continent is
projected for the next forty years to remain the same relative to the whole (0.1%); despite this
realization, however, Islamophobia (see e.g. Kundnani 2014, Lean 2017, Beydoun 2018, Kazi
2019) is on the rise even in Latin America. The present study extracts and examines the most
comment-provoking statuses posted during a two-year period on the Facebook page of the
Ahmadi community of Quito, Ecuador, in order to identify the ideological-linguistic stances
reflected in and discursively created, reproduced, and reified through almost six-hundred
responses by users (members and administrators). In doing so, this study employs Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine (1) the categorization of multimodal messages presented
to the public (viz. textual, audiovisual, visual); (2) the way in which the ‘Other' is defined in the
genre comprising such electronic social networking website posts; and (3) the means through
which positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation are undertaken (cf. van Dijk
1998), ultimately affecting religious group positioning.

113
Strom Megan & Salas, Rosa, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Media representations of Covid-19 in ICE detention centers

Unauthorized Latinx immigrants in the United States live in precarious situations

predicated on their immigration status resulting in negative health outcomes (cf. Novak,
Geronimus, and Martinez-Cardoso, 2017). Not surprisingly, initial reports indicate similar
outcomes for the Latinx community during the Covid-19 crisis due to limited healthcare access
and language barriers (cf. Kaplan, 2020; Wetsman, 2020). As states put into action physical
distancing and shelter-at-home orders to stop the spread of Covid-19, what of the 24,713
immigrants currently detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention
centers? A number of factors places these detainees at a higher risk: employees entering and
leaving detention facilities, the transfer of detainees, cramped living quarters that do not allow
for physical distancing, and limited or no personal protective equipment, Covid-19 tests, and
medical attention for those who test positive for the virus. As such, the current situation
constitutes a crisis that puts the lives of detained Latinx immigrants at risk.
Media coverage of the pandemic has been, understandably, vital for the public to stay abreast of
guidelines, recommendations, and ordinances regarding Covid-19. Previous studies have
shown that, during times of crisis, the media use immigrants as scapegoats (Chavez, 2001;
Chavez and Hoewe, 2012; Santa Ana, 2002). In general terms, the United States media
represent Latinx immigrants negatively, both in English (cf. Santa Ana, 2002) and in Spanish
(cf. Strom, 2013), even highly vulnerable immigrants such as children (Catalano, 2017; Strom
and Alcock, 2017). For these reasons, it is imperative to understand how the media represent
Covid-19 in ICE detention centers in order to determine if this representation promotes justice
for, or if it perpetuates the negative treatment of, detained Latinx immigrants.
The current study considers how media published in Spanish and English represent the
Covid-19 pandemic in ICE detention centers. The dataset includes news articles published from
May 1 to May 31, 2020: 37 articles in Spanish represent 20 different local and national news
sources, while 32 articles in English represent 27 different local and national news sources. The
theoretical framework is based on van Dijk’s (1998, 2008) socio-cognitive approach to Critical
Discourse Studies, while the methodological framework combines van Leeuwen’s (2008)
analysis of social actors and Fairclough’s (2001) analysis of agency. Results indicate nearly
unequivocal opposition of ICE by a number of groups while lack of agency perpetuates the
notion that ICE is a blameless social actor with regards to the inhumane treatment of detained
Latinx immigrants. We call attention to the English-language media’s unprecedented support of
detained Latinx immigrants: such a stance is crucial for promoting social justice for this group
 in the future.

114
Tran Truong, University of Chicago
Microvariation in singular they
Introduction: The increasing (hyper)visibility of transgender, nonbinary, and
gender-nonconforming people has transformed the English pronominal landscape in ways that
significantly affect morphosyntactic theory construction (Conrod 2019, et seq.; Bjorkman 2017;
Konnelly 2019). The most complete treatment of the broadening range of singular they, Konnelly
& Cowper (under review), argues that speakers occupy one of three distinct stages of a
grammatical change in progress.
Stage 1 Anyonei who thinks theyi need more time should ask for an extension.
Stage 2 {Kelly/the strongest student}i will present theiri paper next
Stage 3 {Maria/Arthur/my mother}i wants to send theiri students on the field trip.

1- speakers permit singular they only for quantified/gender-nonspecific antecedents.

2- speakers extend this to antecedents of known gender but with a gender-neutral
description or name.
3-speakers extend this to antecedents of any gender.
K&C locate this variation in two places: the structure of the lexicon and the
optionality of gender features. 1-speakers assign contrastive [M] or [F] to all nouns referring
to people. 2-speakers do so optionally in most cases but do so obligatorily for certain nouns
(e.g, mother) and proper names (e.g, Lisa). For 3-speakers, [M] and [F] are optional,
non-contrastive modifier features. Although the range of they broadens at each stage, this is
not necessarily a progression: it is possible to be a 3-speaker without ever having been a
2-speaker, and it is possible to get ‘stuck’ as a 2-speaker.
Research questions: Using K&C’s model as a jumping-off point, this investigation asks
two questions: are there other ‘stages’, and can we model the lexical/featural differences
between stages via Impoverishment? Impoverishment is a postsyntactic feature-deleting
operation that has been elsewhere used to model intra-individual morphosyntactic
microvariation in the inflectional domain (Nevins & Parrott 2009).
Analysis: All speakers, regardless of stage, have largely similar lexical entries and feature
specifications for gendered names/terms. Pace K&C, what happens when a 2-speaker permits
singular they for a nonbinary individual named Mary is not the creation of a homophonous
lexical entry, but the Impoverishment of the [F]-containing lexical entry. A 3-speaker is
someone with a maximally powerful Impoverishment machinery that can target all gendered
names/terms. The use of Impoverishment allows for a reduction in the size of the lexicon
assumed for 2-speakers, as well as in the size of (what K&C call) the “conceptual leap” that
separates the grammars of 2- and 3-speakers. Localizing differences in the distribution of
singular they in the postsyntactic domain allows for natural accounts of the grammars of
speakers who do not fit in the simplest versions of K&C’s typology. These include
ultraconservative 0-speakers for whom singular they is impossible, even in
quantified/gender-nonspecific contexts, but who still use singular they for nonbinary referents.
Likewise, there are 3-speakers for whom singular they is generally always possible, but
impossible when used with transgender referents with a binary gender identity (in avoidance of
nonconsensual third-gendering, cf. Serano 2007).

Key words morphology, syntax, English, pronouns, singular they, Impoverishment

115
 References
Bjorkman, Bronwyn. 2017. Singular they and the syntactic representation of
gender in English. Glossa 2(1): 1–13.

Conrod, Kirby. 2019. Pronouns raising and emerging. Doctoral dissertation,

University of Washington.

Konnelly, Lex. 2019. Gender diversity and linguistic advocacy: Innovation in the
use of singular they. Presentation at THEY 2019, Queen's University.

Konnelly, Lex & Elizabeth Cowper. Under review. Gender diversity and morphosyntax:
An account of singular they. Ms., University of Toronto.

Nevins, Andrew & Jeffrey K. Parrott. 2010. Variable rules meet Impoverishment theory:
Patterns of agreement leveling in English varieties. Lingua 120(5): 1135–1159.

116
 Vana, Rosti, University of Central Florida
"You know, the red hot Cheeto fingers"- Language attitudes toward heritage students’
Spanish in the advanced mixed class
This present study contributes to the emerging field of advanced mixed, second
language and heritage language courses by addressing an issue that is relevant to
sociolinguistics, second language and heritage language pedagogy. While the sub field of
Spanish heritage language pedagogy has significantly advanced in the last three decades
(Carreira & Kagan, 2018), there is a scarcity of empirical knowledge regarding the
incorporation of sociolinguistic principles and pedagogical practices in mixed second/heritage
courses (Campanaro, 2013; Carreira, 2016; 2017; Charity-Hudley & Mallinson, 2013).
Considering that the majority of heritage language learners in the US are enrolled in
mixed classrooms with their second language peers (Beaudrie, 2012; Carreira 2016), the study of
language attitudes between monolingual contact varieties and second language learner varieties
is crucial to informing pedagogical best practices that serve both types of leaners. By analyzing
the language attitudes of both types of students enrolled in an advanced mixed class toward non-
standard Spanish language varieties, this study demonstrates the importance of
incorporating linguistic variation into the classroom in order to address the linguistic hierarchies
that exist in such a context. This study addresses this imperative by utilizing a matched-guise
(Lambert et al., 1960; during the beginning and the end of the semester as well as end-term semi-
structured interviews to uncover the unconscious biases of students enrolled in said courses.
Results present contradicting findings as heritage Spanish language varieties were evaluated
positively by all students during the pre and post matched-guise tasks.
However, interviews reveal that all students, including other heritage Spanish speakers,
find heritage Spanish the least formal and incorrect Spanish variety in comparison with the
second language student variety. This study has the potential to make an invaluable contribution
to understanding how language attitudes and instructional practices in the classroom context
intersect with the goal to continue fighting educational social justice by aiming to improve mixed
courses in a social, critical, and conscious way.

References
Beaudrie, S. (2012). Research on university-based Spanish heritage language programs in the
United States: The current state of affairs. In S. Beaudrie & M. Fairclough (Eds.),
Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: State of the field (pp. 203-221),
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Campanaro, T. (2013). Spanish Heritage Speakers and Second Language Learners in Mixed
Classrooms: Perceptions of Students and Instructors. (Master’s Thesis). University of
Alberta.
Carreira, M. (2016) A general framework and supporting strategies for teaching mixed
classes. In D. Pascual y Cabo (Ed.), Advances in Spanish as a Heritage Language
(pp. 159-176).
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Carreira, M. (2017, March). Parameters of variation in mixed classes: Focus on reactivity to
instruction. In R. Vana, L. Essah, and S. Domaz (Chairs), 6th Annual Hispanic and
Lusobrazilian Linguistics Conference. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.
Carreira. M., & Kagan, O. (2018). Heritage language education: A proposal for the next 50
years. Foreign Language Annals 51, 152-168.
Charity- Hudley, A., & Mallinson, C. (2013). We Do Language: English Variation in the
Secondary English Classroom. Teachers College Press.
117
 VañóGarcía, Inés, City University of New York
Una aproximación a la historiografía de la American Association of Teachers of Spanish: la
configuración de la enseñanza del español en Estados Unidos
El presente trabajo explora, desde una perspectiva lingüística e ideológica, la
historiografía de la American Associaction of Teachers of Spanish – AATS (1916) en los
Estados Unidos durante la primera mitad del siglo XX. Debido a varios factores sociopolíticos,
económicos e históricos – como la pérdida de las colonias españolas en 1898, la apertura del
Canal de Panamá en 1914 y las olas migratorias de Europa, Cuba, Puerto Rico y el Caribe – el
cambio de siglo vio una mayor demanda en el sistema educativo para enseñar the living
languages, especialmente el español. Considerando a la AATS como un agente normativo
fundamental dentro de este proceso, analizamos desde un punto de vista crítico e histórico los
discursos de sus miembros más influyentes publicados en Hispania, la revista oficial de la
Asociación.
De este modo, pretendemos evidenciar los mecanismos que utilizan los miembros de
dicha institución para administrar la lengua española, y establecer su autoridad y legitimidad en
el ámbito académico dentro del territorio estadounidense. Asimismo, investigamos (1) cómo se
entrelazan las prácticas lingüísticas y sociales con dos tipos de discurso comparables con las
nociones ideológicas de “pride and profit” propuestas por Heller and Duchêne (2011), y (2) los
mecanismos y procesos ideológicos (hispanismo vs. panamericanismo) que (re)producen una
representación particular de la lengua española para comprender la historia política del español
en los Estados Unidos; el cual, además de su permanente presencia y exposición en el país, es
un idioma relegado en su mayoría como inmigrante y extranjero (Del Valle y García 2013;
Lozano, 2018).
Nuestro objetivo es enmarcar tanto los orígenes como la evolución de la asociación
durante este eje temporal dentro de un contexto nacional y transnacional, teniendo en cuenta
los eventos geopolíticos y las relaciones entre Estados Unidos, América Latina y España. A
pesar de que la AATS fue pionera en la elaboración de materiales de enseñanza del español,
metodologías de instrucción y prácticas pedagógicas, algunos de sus miembros más
representativos fueron los responsables del surgimiento y posicionamiento de la formación,
organización y estructuración de los estudios hispánicos en Estados Unidos (DeGiovanni,
2018).

Bibliografía:

Degiovanni, F. (2018). Vernacular Latin Americanisms: War, the Market, and the Making of
a Discipline. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Del Valle, J., y García, O. (2013). Introduction to the making of Spanish: US perspectives. En:
J. del Valle (Ed.), A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language (pp.249-
259). Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.
Heller, M., y Duchêne, A. (2012). Pride and Profit: Changing Discourses of Language, Capital
and Nation-State. En: A. Duchêne y M. Heller (eds), Language in late capitalism (pp.
11-31). Routledge.
Lozano, R. (2018). An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (Vol.
49). Univ of California Press.

118
 Villa, Daniel, New Mexico State University
A taco by any other name still tastes as good: Reconsidering lexical variation in U.S.
Spanish
At the time of writing of this paper, local restaurants in southern New Mexico are still
prohibited from sit-down service, but can sell meals on a to-go basis. The generic white
Styrofoam containers used to package take-out food have become ubiquitous. If more than one
meal is ordered, restaurants will often use a marker pen to indicate the contents of each white
box. Imagine one’s surprise, then, upon opening a box labeled “sandwich” only to find a taco al
pastor nestled within. The label on the box does not correspond to its contents, that is, what a
prototypical notion of a “sandwich” is. I believe that this serves as an appropriate metaphor for
certain lexical items found in U.S. Spanish. As but a single example, consider the word
carpeta. This word is used in many varieties of Spanish to signify “file folder”, e.g. a folded
piece of stiff paper used to contain a collection of individual pages. However, in U.S. Spanish
carpeta can also signify alfombra, “carpet”, a covering for floors. Prescriptivists and purists
often look down on such usage, deeming it a deformation of standard Spanish due to contact
with English.
However, an examination of the origins of the term “carpet” in English reveals that it derives
from the Old French carpite, and this from the Medieval Latin or Old Italian carpita, “heavy
decorated cloth, carpet”. Returning to the Styrofoam box metaphor, the term carpeta, “file
folder”, is written on the outside of the box, but in examining the semantic origin of the word,
we find inside the conservation of the older, original meaning. In a sense, the English “carpet”
has served as a semantic reservoir for the original Latin, and reinvested that meaning into the
modern U.S. Spanish carpeta. Thus, the original Latinate form now co-exists with the later
Arabic origin borrowing alfombra. In sum, a number of forms such as these exist in U.S.
Spanish, representing not a borrowing from a Germanic language but rather a conservation of
the Vulgar Latin which was to become modern Spanish.
 

119
Villanueva, Aubrey, Katherine Christoffersen, Ryan Bessett & Elsa Magaña, University of
Texas Rio Grande Valley
“The Language of our Community”: How the creation of community-based corpora
affects students
Involving students in the collection, transcription and analysis of sociolinguistic
interviews for the development of community-based corpora is certainly not new (Bills &
Vigil, 2007; Bullock & Toribio, 2013; Carvalho, 2012; Torres-Cacoullos & Travis, 2010;
Zentella, 2004). Yet, few studies have examined the students’ perspectives on their
participation in the project.
In order to shed light on these experiences, an anonymous online open-ended survey
was distributed to students participating in a course where they participated in corpus building
activities for the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) (Christoffersen & Bessett, 2019). An
analysis of 33 student responses reveals four significant repeated themes 1) Increased sense of
community awareness 2) Increased appreciation of local language varieties 3) Development of
professional skills 4) Interest in research as a possible future option. First, students discussed
feeling an enhanced sense of community engagement as a result of interviewing Rio Grande
Valley speakers for the CoBiVa. Many students reported an increased appreciation of local
language varieties. The project allowed the students to further develop professional skills.
Some students reported a new interest in continuing sociolinguistic research in the future.

Since the development of community corpora requires a large amount of time, energy,
and effort that is traditionally undervalued by academia and universities (Buys & Bursnall,
2007), these results may help us gain a greater understanding of the importance of creating
community-driven corpora, including what students are taking away from the entire experience
and how to improve the process of corpus building. This study may encourage scholars to
undertake the task of creating large-scale linguistic corpora with students. The study proposes
a model for the assessment of student experiences. Furthermore, the documentation of positive
student outcomes is imperative to secure funding for the development of additional
sociolinguistic corpora, which will in turn enhance our understanding of Spanish in the U.S.

References:
Bills, G. & Vigil, N. (2007). New Mexico and Colorado Spanish Survey.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico.
Bullock, B. & Toribio, A. J. (2013). The Spanish in Texas Corpus Project. COERLL, The
University of Texas at Austin. http://www.spanishintexas.org
Buys, N. & Bursnall, S. (2007). Establishing university-community partnerships: Processes
and benefits. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 29(1). 73-86.
Carvalho, A. M. (2012-). Corpus del Español en el Sur de Arizona (CESA). University of
Arizona. Retrieved from https://cesa.arizona.edu/
Christoffersen, K. & Bessett, R. (2019-). Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa). University of
Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Nagy, N. & Lyskawa, P. (2016). Moving forward with multilingual transcription. Workshop
presented at Linguistics Society of America, Washington, DC.
120
Torres-Cacoullos, R. & Travis, C. (2010). The New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual
(NMSEB) Corpus.
Zentella, A. C. (2004). Transfronteriz@s at the Tijuana-San Diego Border. University of
California San Diego.

121
  Wang, Penglin, Central Washington University
Kitan Official Title Mili Mateben (彌⾥⾺特本) as a Chiliad Commander

As the founder and ruler of the Liao dynasty (907-1125) Kitan had been one of the
easternmost polities in Inner Asia and henceforth a terminal recipient of the benefits of
transcontinental linguistic and cultural exchange from west to east and from south to north. I
investigate the origin of Kitan official title mili mateben (Liaoshi 45.718) in terms of chiliad
commandership and connect its first component mili with Latin mīlle ‘thousand’, though the
provenance of its second component mateben remains unclear to me. A chiliad military division
had constituted an essential echelon in the military organization of Inner Asian powers since
remote antiquity. Kitan is no exception. Liaoshi (14.156, 46.739) testifies to the existence of a
military commanding department named the ‘Chiliad Chiefs of Staff’. At the point where the
chiliad organization with a commander-in-chief stood prominent in Kitan defense strategy, early
historians recorded the title mili mateben.
Reading Liaoshi turns up a series of three-dimension exercises in Kitan official titles owing
to language contact and its resultant Kitan adoption of the Latin mīlle, Old Turkic irkin ‘ruler’,
and Chinese jiangjun (將軍) ‘military general’, with the latter two transcribed as yilijin (夷離
菫) and śingun (xingun ⾟ 袞 ), respectively. Although mateben is less transparent in its
exact meaning, we will be able to explain the title mili mateben as ‘chiliad commander’ by
adhering step by step to what is presented in Liaoshi. First, Liaoshi (116.1534) defines yilijin as
the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and horses, which was retitled as grand king at the
beginning of Kitan Huitong (會同) reign period (938-947). Second, Liaoshi (45.718, 116.1543)
maintains that the Kitan yilijin was originally titled mili mateben, which was changed and
upgraded to śingun in 938. However, Liaoshi (46.725) also notes that the title śingun was
originally called mateben. By following the latter statement, we can conclude that mateben alone,
instead of the whole phrase mili mateben, means and equals śingun meaning ‘general’ in Chinese,
leaving mili in the sense of ‘thousand’ and mili mateben of ‘chief of a thousand’.
Moreover, it would be possible to interpret the attested glossing of Kitan mili as ‘village’ in
Liaoshi (46.725) as a result of semantic change from ‘thousand’. The Kitan chiliad military unit
must have had a somewhat constant base with headquarter and logistics, and that base gradually
evolved or was perceived to be a settlement or village.
In practice, the symbiotic pattern of officiating chiliad units in both military and civilian
organization took place in the history of Inner Asia. For instance, Written Mongolian mingğan
‘thousand’ was used for both military and civilian divisions and extended to name villages as
found in the Mongolian region. Unlike its etymon jiangjun in Chinese, Kitan śingun was not
confined to a military rank and was instead generalized to civilian officialdom such as county
commissioner. This study highlights the old substratum of Latin mīlle in Kitan and subsequently
increasing influence of Turkic and Chinese on Kitan.

122
  Waughtal, Deb The Ohio State University
¡Uno se acostumbra! Uno se acostumbra: Linguistic structures in the co-construction of
memory and agency within narratives of war and trauma
US Salvadorans who participate in sociolinguistic interviews are asked to talk about their
hometown, what it was like growing up in El Salvador, and about their decisions to migrate.
Linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists ask those who can recall the 1970’s and 80’s about
their involvement in the Salvadoran civil war. Migration from El Salvador was not limited to
one socioeconomic class or political party. Thus, waves of immigration to the US during this
time period included people from lower, upper, and middle class status; all were fleeing the
violence occurring during the civil war (Lipski 1988).
Research conducted on migrant narratives points to commonly occurring discourses
within memories of trauma—traumas experienced during the war and journeys made while
crossing the US border (Baker-Cristales 2004; Machuca 2010; Abrego 2014; Arnold 2015;
Osuna 2017; Parsons-Dick & Arnold 2017 i.a.). Studies of migration often examine how
migrant discourses align with power structures and dominant discourses. Linguistic structures
themselves are less examined in studies of migration. The present paper examines speakers use
of four language structures as participants recall their experiences within narratives of memory
and trauma.
This study contributes to the field of linguistic anthropology in two aspects. First, it adds
to the body of existing research on Central American migration, shedding light on the
relationship between linguistic structures and (i) individual and collective memory; (ii) within-
memory reactions on the part of speakers and listeners to descriptions of trauma and violence;
and (iii) present-day orientations on the part of speakers toward traumatic and painful events
experienced during the war. Second, it contributes to research on memory and agency. I examine
the co-construction of memory, drawing data from dialogues that take place between US
Salvadorans across five, semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews. The interviews are
conducted by US-born researchers.
The present focus on connections between recurring linguistic structures and co-
constructed memories of trauma presents speaker subjectivities and a picture of how immigrants
understand the way their past experiences influence them today. The structures I examine are:
(1) non-specific subject pronouns (NsSP); (2) repetition of words and phrases; (3) overlapping
utterances; and (4) humor.
I use both quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine speakers’ use of ambiguous
subject pronouns tú-uno-nosotros, ‘you-one-we’ across discourse topics. I use qualitative
analysis to examine informants’ use of singular and plural NsSP within collective, as well as
individual, experiences speakers recall. Usage may be nonspecific, yet still carry the function of
introducing specific groups. Nonspecific usage of 2nd person singular tú, for example,
represents ‘every person living in El Salvador’ at the time being discussed within narratives of
war. The remaining three linguistic structures foreground (ii & iii above). Throughout
unstructured sections of the interviews, participants recount their experiences in their own right,
responding to unscripted questions from the interviewer as they formulate representations of
themselves within the experiences they recall for their listeners, themselves, and their
compatriots (Fentress & Weckham 1992).

Works Cited

Abrego, Leisy J. 2014. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across
Borders. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
123
 Arnold, Lynnette. “The reconceptualization of agency through ambiguity and
contradiction: Salvadoran women narrating unauthorized migration” Women's Studies
International Forum 52 (2015) 10–19.
Arnold, Lynnette. (2016). “Communicative Care Across Borders: Language,
Materiality, and Affect in Transnational Family Life.” PhD University of California, Santa
Barbara.
Baker-Cristales, Beth. “Salvadoran Transformations Class Consciousness and Ethnic
Identity in a Transnational Milieu” Latin American Perspectives. 31.5 (2004): 15-33.
Fentress, James. Social Memory. E-book, Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992,
https://hdl- handlenet.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/2027/heb.03955.
Lipski, J. “Salvadorans in the United States: Patterns of intra-Hispanic migration.”
National Journal of Sociology 3 (1989): 97–119.
Machuca, Milton R. 2010.“In Search of Salvadorans in the United States:
Contextualizing the Ethnographic Record.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural
Systems and World Economic Development. 39.1, 2 (2010): 1-47.
Osuna, Steven. “‘Obstinate Transnational Memories’: How Oral Histories Shape
Salvadoran-Mexican Subjectivities.” U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing
Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance (2017).
Parsons-Dick, Hilary and Arnold, Lynnette. “From South to North and back again:
Making and blurring boundaries in conversations across borders.” Language & Communication
59 (2018): 17–27.

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 Wheeler,
Eva Michelle, Oakwood University
Reinterpreting American Blackness through Racial Language in Translations of African
American Literature and Film

The present study examines the rendering of racial terms and stylized racial speech in
Peninsular and Latin American Spanish dubbings of the film BlacKkKlansman. Because of the
particularities of its language use, BlacKkKlansman presents several challenges for the
translator. The first challenge lies in tackling the breadth and the specificity of the culturally-
bound racial lexicon of twentieth-century U.S. English. The second challenge for the translator
is the representation of language varieties that are “racialized” in English but have no equivalent
in the target language. Existing studies have explored the rendering of racial labels in film
dubbing (e.g., Giampieri 2017, Mereu Keating 2014, Mouka et al 2015) and the representation
of racialized language varieties in literary translation (e.g., Berthele 2000, Cury Sarian 2002). To
this point, however, these two types of studies have represented parallel but separate lines of
inquiry, and no existing study examines both translation phenomena. Nevertheless, both lines of
inquiry provide helpful insight for identifying the strategies that translators employ to translate
racial language and for analyzing the effect of these choices on the translated text.
The present study explores the translation of racial language related to American
Blackness—both racial labels and racialized language varieties—in the context of two Spanish
dubbings of BlacKkKlansman. Through this analysis, the study examines the lexical choices and
translation strategies employed by translators as they render the film’s racial lexicon and
represent the racialized language varieties for their target audiences. The study also highlights
the effect that translators’ choices can have on the underlying message of the text and considers
whether this implicates an expanded role for the translator in the rendering of this type of
culturally-bound language. The results indicate conservative tendencies and a general aversion
to taking big risks in the translation of racial language. In the context of this particular subject
matter, a traditional and conservative approach to the translation captures the broad strokes of
racial ideas but erases some important nuances. The comparison of the two dubbings allows for
the observation of the concrete ways that specific interventions can actually do the work of
“maximum equivalence”. When translator interventions preserve linguistic distinctions from the
original text, when they situate linguistic phenomena in impactful ways, when they are faithful
to both the broad strokes and the subtle nuances of the underlying story, they should not only be
encouraged but expected from translators who are rendering the racial language of marginalized
populations.

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Willson,
  Jacob Arizona State University
Labeling Clitics in Ibero-Romance
In this paper, I examine the role of Labeling in Ibero-Romance Clisis. Although the
phenomenon has received much attention for many years, syntactic theory has yet to give it an
adequate treatment with respect to Labeling, vis à vis the framework outlined in Chomsky (2013,
2015).
I demonstrate that in Ibero-Romance, the already common assumption that clitics are
simultaneously X0 and XP (Chomsky, 1995, p.228), what I call D(P), causes labeling
ambiguities which are mitigated by verb-to-clitic and clitic-to-verb adjunction. Adjunction
mitigates the labeling ambiguity of the D(P) clitic by creating either a complex head, in the case
of enclisis, or a phrase, in the case of proclisis. The D(P)- likeness of the clitic causes it to be
unstable in its base-generated position, encouraging it to merge up the structure until it adjoins
to, or is adjoined to by, the verb, i.e. cliticization. When movement is required above the
cliticization site but head-movement is barred (e.g. by an intervening head), proclisis obtains.
When head-movement is possible between the cliticization site and the final destination of the
clitic complex, enclisis obtains.
This analysis reduces the various proclisis triggers mentioned in the literature (i.e.
negation (e.g. vi-a ontem → não a vi ontem), wh-movement (viu-a ontem → quem a viu
ontem? ), subordination (ele disse que a viu ontem), and topicalization (só um whisky lhe
demos)) to a question of labelability.

References

Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Current Studies in Linguistics Series. MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (2013). Problems of Projection. Lingua, 130:33–49.
Chomsky, N. (2015). Problems of Projection: Extensions. Structures, strategies and beyond:
 Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti, pages 1–16.The Development of Verbal Morphosyntax by
Novice Second Language Learners of Spanish

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Yarrington, Kara University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The Development of Verbal Morphosyntax by Novice Second Language Learners of Spanish
In Spanish, finite verbs are conjugated to overtly express person, number, tense, aspect
and mood features and agree with the subject. Nonfinite Spanish verbs do not carry the
aforementioned features. Adult second language (L2) learners produce most of their verbs
correctly; though when they do make errors, adult L2 learners principally employ nonfinite verbs
in finite contexts (Prévost P. , 2008; Prévost & White, 2000). To explain this phenomenon,
building on the Full Transfer/Full Access theory (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), Lardiere (2000;
2008; 2009) proposes the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), wherein after the initial
mapping of the first language (L1) features to the L2, learners add to, delete from and re-
assemble the L1 features to produce target grammar in their L2. In the context of verbal
morphosyntax, therefore, learners must assemble the abovementioned features on finite verbs and
map those features morphophonologically at the point of production. If at production the learner
is lacking a feature from L1 reassembly or whose working memory does not generate the correct
morphophonological form, the learner will select, per Distributed Morphology (Siddiqi, 2010),
an underspecified form that has the most features in common with the target without having any
more. Over time, as learners reassemble features to be more target like in the L2, fewer finiteness
errors will be made. The present study seeks to confirm the FRH and from it has the following
hypotheses:
1. Novice L2 Spanish learners will produce finite verbs only in finite positions
and nonfinite verbs in both nonfinite and, to a lesser extent, finite positions.
2. Finiteness errors will decrease over time.

To test these hypotheses, fourteen students in an intensive beginner Spanish course—

designed to teach the content of a first and second semester course in one semester—participated
in three 1.5-hour sessions across a 15-week semester. They completed six tasks eliciting oral
production in their L2 Spanish including story retelling, storytelling, picture description, the 20-
questions game, role-play and informal conversation. The tasks targeted person, number, and tense
to track acquisition of those features and longitudinal accuracy development. Additionally, they
targeted vocabulary familiar to students: talking about family, basic objects, and activities. Data
were transcribed and coded for verbal features and errors made. Descriptive statistics were used
due to the small sample size.
Results support the study’s hypotheses and the FRH demonstrating that participants
correctly used finite and nonfinite verbs above 90% across all sessions, and, importantly,
decreased their use of non-finite verbs in finite contexts across time, though with a u-shaped
curve. The participants attributed finite features on the nonfinite verbs (i.e. “Yo no bailar”)
concurrently with target-like finite verbs in finite contexts. Errors of finite verbs in finite
contexts also decreased across time, though at different rates for each participant. This research
provides insight into the longitudinal development of novice L2 language learners’ oral verbal
morphosyntax. Future studies should strive to have larger quantities of participants for
 inferential statistics and greater generalizability.

References
Lardiere, D. (2000). Mapping features to forms in second language acquisition. In J. Archibald
(Ed.), Second language acquisition and linguistic theory (pp. 102-129). Malden, MA:
Blackwell.

Lardiere, D. (2008). Feature-Assembly in Second Langauge Acquisition. In J. Liceras, H. Zobl,

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 & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition (pp.
106-140). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lardiere, D. (2009, April). Some thoughts on the contrastive analysis of features in second
language acquisition. Second Language Research, 25(2), 173-227. Retrieved from
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43103794
Prévost, P. (2008). Knowledge of morphology and syntax in early adult L2 French: Evidence for
the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. In J. M. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck
(Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition (pp. 352-377). New
York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Prévost, P., & White, L. (2000). Missing surface inflection or impairment in second
language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language
Research, 16(2), 103-133.

Schwartz, B. D., & Sprouse, R. A. (1996). L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access
model. Second Language Research, 12(1), 40-72.

Siddiqi, D. (2010). Distributed Morphology. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(7), 524-542.
doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2010.00212.x

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