The Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs), the languages that developed in Latin America from the contact of African languages and Spanish in colonial times, are rich in structures that would be considered ungrammatical in standard Spanish and that may be used as a powerful testing ground for formal syntactic hypotheses (Kayne 1996; Sessarego 2014). The historical origins of these varieties are extremely intriguing, since it still has to be explained why we do not find creole languages in certain regions of Spanish America, where the socio-demographic conditions for creole languages to emerge appeared to have been in place in colonial times. Nowadays, in contrast, we can find such contact varieties in similar former colonies, which were ruled by the British, the French or the Dutch (McWhorter 2000; Lipski 2005; Schwegler 2010). Despite the fascinating implications of this phenomenon, our knowledge of the AHLAs remains extremely limited, both linguistically and historically.
This project will implement a unique combination of sociolinguistic techniques for data collection along with generative models of data analysis, to obtain more fine-grained, empirically testable generalizations on the grammatical nature of the AHLAs. It also draws on a strong interdisciplinary cooperation, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal and anthropological insights to cast light on the origin of these contact varieties.
The interns will conduct research on a variety of linguistic and socio-historical aspects of the AHLAs. Research will not be limited to coding/transcribing data. Students will carry out projects in which they have an interest. They will meet periodically with me to discuss their findings and will collaborate with other students working on similar topics. The goal is to obtain a publishable paper by the end of the internship. I have a number of identified AHLA topics that would be appropriate for undergraduate research projects of this kind.
Some knowledge of Spanish would help.
One semester.
This internship will provide the participant with the opportunity to work on a project related to the AHLAs. Key components of this project include research instruction, academic counseling and mentoring, participation in specialized linguistic conferences, and first-hand experience with outreach service to the local community.
Students will work closely with me on a research project. After having selected a specific topic in line with the aim of this research proposal and with the interests of the intern, we will set the goals for the semester. I will meet periodically with the student to answer potential questions, discuss the findings, and exchange ideas on how to proceed towards the established goals.
Students will also be encouraged to submit an abstract to present their research to the Texas Linguistics Society Conference (TLSC) and to the Symposium about Language and Society - Austin (SALSA), two student-organized conferences that take place in Austin every year.
Moreover, the interns will be integrated into a collaboration I have developed with College Forward (CoFo), a non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas, which provides college access and college persistence services to motivated, economically disadvantaged students, in order to facilitate their transition to college and make the process exciting and rewarding. In this way, interns will also learn how academic research may be used to inform and benefit the general public.
