New Directions In Hispanic Linguistics

This volume addresses some lacunae in Hispanic linguistic research by focusing on new scholarly directions, exploring understudied topics as well as speech communities, and presenting new takes on relevant linguistic and sociocultural issues. This publication answers questions which have emerged as a result of the rapid increase in Hispanic linguistic research since the latter part of the twentieth century or that have remained open in spite of it. With the rapid growth of Hispanic Linguistics during the 21st century, the topics included in this volume are representative of the breadth, vitality, and interdisciplinarity of contemporary linguistic scholarship. They also reflect that linguistics, in general, has become more methodologically sophisticated. This book is comprised of twelve chapters divided into three parts. Part I addresses language ideology and language contact issues that are embedded in important sociolinguistic and cultural topics chronologically spanning from the 16th century to the present. Although these issues take place in Spain, the United States, Turkey and Ecuador, they pertain ideologically to all corners of the Hispanic World and beyond. Part II is devoted to pragmatics and language variation with topics that transport us to Colombia, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela. The study of politeness strategies shows how Spanish speakers reduce social distance between interlocutors as they make conversation a pleasant and cooperative meeting place. Concurrently, sociolinguistic innovations reveal interesting parallels among several speech communities. Part III explores linguistic variation as it relates to theoretical, structural, and instructional issues. Although these topics are analyzed based mainly on linguistic usage in Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, and Spain – as with the rest of this volume – their relevance reaches far beyond the confines of the Hispanic World. This book is unique in multiple ways and complements a number of existing publications.

This volume addresses a wide range of phenomena including intonation, restructuring, clitic climbing, aspectual structure, subject focus marking, code-switching, lenition, loanwords, and heritage learning that are central in Hispanic linguistics today. The authors approach these issues from a variety of recent theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies and make important contributions to our current understanding of language acquisition, theoretical and descriptive linguistics, and language contact. This collection of articles is a testimony to the breadth and degree of specialization of the scholarly interest in the field. The selection of refereed chapters included in this volume were originally presented at the 20th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS) hosted at Georgetown University, 2016. The book should be read with interest by scholars and graduate students hoping to gain insight into the issues currently debated in Hispanic Linguistics.

This volume addresses a wide range of phenomena including intonation, restructuring, clitic climbing, aspectual structure, subject focus marking, code-switching, lenition, loanwords, and heritage learning that are central in Hispanic linguistics today. The authors approach these issues from a variety of recent theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies and make important contributions to our current understanding of language acquisition, theoretical and descriptive linguistics, and language contact. This collection of articles is a testimony to the breadth and degree of specialization of the scholarly interest in the field. The selection of refereed chapters included in this volume were originally presented at the 20th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS) hosted at Georgetown University, 2016. The book should be read with interest by scholars and graduate students hoping to gain insight into the issues currently debated in Hispanic Linguistics.

This volume presents research from across the subdisciplines of Hispanic Linguistics in an attempt to showcase how new research methods, together with a renewed focus on language variation, have advanced our field. This volume is divided into three sections of original research, with the first describing regional variation of Spanish, the second synchronic variation, and the third learner profile variation. Such nuanced descriptions and analyses would not be possible without new variationist research methods and big-data techniques such as the use of online corpora and data reduction analyses. These overarching themes represent a paradigm shift affecting the whole of Hispanic Linguistics, and are, therefore, best appreciated in an edited volume composed of diverse manifestations of trends like those included herein. The data from these submissions were originally presented at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium hosted by Wake Forest University in 2021.

Reflecting the growth and increasing global importance of the Spanish language, The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics brings together a team of renowned Spanish linguistics scholars to explore both applied and theoretical work in this field. Features 41 newly-written essays contributed by leading language scholars that shed new light on the growth and significance of the Spanish language Combines current applied and theoretical research results in the field of Spanish linguistics Explores all facets relating to the origins, evolution, and geographical variations of the Spanish language Examines topics including second language learning, Spanish in the classroom, immigration, heritage languages, and bilingualism

The analysis of language attitudes is important not only because attitudes can affect language maintenance and language change but also because such reflections and discussions can bring light to social, cultural, political and educational matters that require an interdisciplinary approach. This volume fills a crucial void in the field of Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics by introducing the latest production in the discipline of attitudes toward Spanish, Spanish sign language, Portuguese, Guarani and Papiamentu around the world, from South America and the Caribbean to the United States, Spain and Japan. The studies presented in this collection – a variety of sociolinguistic scenarios and methodological approaches – will make an important contribution to theoretical discussions on linguistic attitudes, specifically in the domains of language integration through education, language policy, and language maintenance. This book is intended for sociolinguists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities as well as graduate students enrolled in sociolinguistics courses.

This volume presents sixteen new articles on the acquisition of Romance languages by both well-established researchers and vital new contributors to the field. Under a generative umbrella, the articles in this collection investigate the acquisition of French, Romanian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian and Portuguese across different contexts including first language acquisition, bilingual acquisition, specifically impaired first language acquisition, child L2 acquisition, second language acquisition, as well as first language attrition. This volume advances our understanding of how languages are acquired and how the study of Romance languages contributes to clarifying challenging open questions on the acquisition of key functional categories and other related phenomena. In particular, the articles included assess complexity as a relevant factor shaping children’s acquisition of syntactic and phonological structures, they refine crucial theoretical constructs such as parameter setting and language transfer, and propose language change as another crucial factor affecting the process of language acquisition and attrition.

This volume comprises cutting edge research on language contact and change. The chapters present a wide scope of settings in which Spanish is in contact with other languages, such as Catalan, English, and Quechua; a large breadth of geographical areas (e.g., United States, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina); and varied participant groups, ranging from dialect contacts, second-language learners and heritage speakers to balanced bilinguals and code-switchers. Taken together, the chapters provide rich empirical descriptions of data pertaining to different levels of language, diverse – naturalistic and experimental – methodological approaches to data collection, as well as theoretical implications of the findings. The interdisciplinary perspective adopted by the authors contributes to the linguistic analysis and offers important insights into theoretical linguistics in general, and into theories of sociolinguistics, language variation, bilingualism, and second language acquisition.