Speakers

The University of Guelph will be welcoming leading experts and graduate students who will be presenting their work on Ecuadorian varieties of Spanish.

Christina García

Christina García is an Assistant Professorof Spanish and Linguistics at Saint Louis University. As a sociolinguist and phonetician, she is interested in why Spanish speakers talk the way they do, and how to get students excited about the linguistic diversity of the Spanish-speaking world. She has studied and done fieldwork in Argentina and Ecuador, and her research examines how sounds are socially meaningful and contribute to the formation of regional identities. Her work has been published in journals such as Language Variation and Change and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and brings cutting-edge techniques used in sociophonetics to the forefront of Hispanic Linguistics.

Christian Puma

Christian Puma is a Ph.D. Student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, with a specialization in Sociolinguistics. He completed his undergraduate studies at PUCE in Applied Linguistics. He has organized a series of activities with students and indigenous communities related to the "Orality and Modernity" project led by Prof. Haboud. He has organized workshops, field work in indigenous communities, project information workshops, revision of interview transcriptions and other material for publication. He was a facilitator in training sessions of linguistic analysis software, databases and new technologies. He participated in the International Symposium on Languages in Contact: Challenges and Diversity (Quito, 2016).

Daniela Narváez

Daniela Narvaez is a Hispanic Linguistics Graduate Student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Daniela has worked on the interdisciplinary project "Orality and Modernity" with Marleen Haboud at the Catholic University in Ecuador, working closely with indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian highlands. Based on quantitative and qualitative data obtained through interviews, conversations, direct observation, and living in the communities, she researched the vitality of the Quichua language of the Karanki people. This experience peaked her interest in Languages in Contact, Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology. Her current research focuses on the use or the omission of the direct object clitic in two varieties of the Andean Ecuadorian Spanish in two major cities: Quito and Cuenca.

Erin O'Rourke

Dr. O'Rourke is an Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Graduate Advisor at the University of Alabama (Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain). Her research interests include intonation, sociolinguistics, and languages in contact. She has studied Spanish-English code-switching and Spanish intonation in Peru and Ecuador. She has also examined Quechua and Aymara relative clauses, vowels in Aymara, and intonation of Cuzco Quechua (Peru) and Tena Quichua (Ecuador). She is interested in investigating Spanish in the United States in contact with both English and other varieties of Spanish. She is a co-editor of one of the most important publications: Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, and has published over 16 other journal articles, and book chapters.

Hannah Jesberger

Ms. Jesberger is an independent researcher and recent BA graduate from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She was the recipient of the Student Excellence faward rom the History Department. She has presented her research in the Latinamerican Conference in Ohio in 2017. Ms. Jesberger's participation in the symposium will be a good addition, as she has worked with youtube recordings of the speech of young Quiteño speakers.

Jorge Gómez Rendón

Jorge Gómez Rendón studied Anthropology and Applied Linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Quito and obtained his MA in Cultural Studies from the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (2001). He obtained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam with a comparative typological study of lexical and grammatical borrowings in several Amerindian languages (Typological and social constraints on Language Contact, LOT 2008). His studies on the linguistic contact between the Quichua and Spanish in the Ecuadorian Highlands address the emergence of a mixed variety known as Media Lengua (Linguistic Mestizaje in the Andes, Abya Yala 2008). In recent years, his work has focused on the documentation and revitalization of several threatened languages of Ecuador, with special emphasis on the mobilization of products for education, especially through lexicographical material and compilations of oral tradition. He is currently a consultant in linguistic documentation and registration of intangible cultural heritage projects for national and foreign agencies.

Kathleen Guerra

Ms. Guerra is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on processes of grammaticalization and transfer in situations of language contact in the northern Andean region of Ecuador. She is the author of a book chapter: "Languages in Contact: Grammaticalization and Complexification in Northern Andean Gerundianismo" (in press). This paper provides an important contribution to grammaticalization processes in language change.

Leslie Del Carpio

Leslie Del Carpio, is a student in the MA program of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her academic interests are related to studies of language contact, language variation and morphology of Andean Spanish, with a special focus on the speech of Peruvian and Ecuadorian Spanish. Her research interests include Quechua and its varieties, as well as concepts such as identity and language attitudes. Leslie presented a paper titled "Subject Pronoun Expression in Lima Spanish Norms" at the conference on Spanish in the US and Spanish in Contact with Other Languages. This led to the study of this linguistic variable in the speech of Quiteños from Ecuador. 

Leonardo Carvajal

Leonardo Carvajal is a native from Ambato, Ecuador. He has a BA Degree in Psychology. He received an MA in Spanish Language and Culture from Saint Louis University, and is currently a graduate student in the Master's program in Spanish as a Second or Bilingual Language at Michigan State University. His research interests are sociophonetics and bilingualism, (Spanish and Quichua in the Andean region of Ecuador). His work to date includes a map of the vocalic space for bilinguals Quichua-Spanish. He has presented his work on language policy in Ecuador and its impact in the revitalization of native languages at the Second International Congress on Indigenous Languages in Querétaro, México.

María Elena Placencia

María Elena Placencia is Reader in Spanish Linguistics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her current research is in the areas of sociopragmatics, variational pragmatics and computer-mediated discourse analysis. She has published extensively on language and social interaction in relation to a range of topics (e.g. speech acts, addressing behaviour, doing sociability in familial and institutional contexts, the discourse of bargaining, discursive racism, etc.) and sociocultural contexts in the Spanish-and-English-speaking worlds, with a focus on Ecuadorian Spanish. Her book publications include Actos de habla y cortesía (Lincom, co-edited), Spanish Pragmatics (Palgrave, co-authored), Research in Politeness in the Spanish-speaking World (Taylor & Francis, co-edited), Estudios de variación pragmática en español (Dunken, co-edited), Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish (John Benjamins, co-edited), and Pragmática y comunicación intercultural en el mundo hispanohablante (Rodopi/Brill, co-edited). She co-founded The International Association for the Study of Spanish in Society (SIS) and is a member of the editorial board of over 10 international journals.

Molly Cole

Molly Cole is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics at Indiana University. She has concentrated her studies on phonetics, sociolinguistics, and language contact and works primarily with indigenous populations in Ecuador, as well as with heritage speaker populations of Spanish in the United States. She has presented work on the influence of language contact on the use of differential object marking in Spanish at multiple conferences in the United States. Her dissertation deals with the intersection of socio-phonetics and language contact. Furthermore, she has significant training in the field of Laboratory Phonology.

Paola Enríquez

Paola is a Linguistics MA student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her areas of interest are contact linguistics, grammaticalization, and linguistic-anthropology. She has collaborated on the "Orality and Modernity" interdisciplinary project, centered on the Ecuadorian indigenous languages and their relationships with the globalized world. She has done fieldwork in different Quichua communities, sociolinguistic interviews, and data analysis. She developed a research project on the role of Quichua in the construction of the identity in the Cañari people. She has worked with language identity and ideologies centered on the Cañaris' Quichua-Spanish bilingualism, a study presented at the LASSO 2017 Conference in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her current research and final MA project, focuses on the Ecuadorian Andean Spanish variety, specifically on the grammaticalization of the verb 'saber'. She presented a first approach to this topic at the ALFAL Conference in Bogotá, in July 2017.

Pieter Muysken

Pieter Muysken obtained his B.A. from Yale University (1972) and his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam (1977). His main research interests are Andean languages, Creole languages, and language contact. He was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 1998, a KNAW Academy Chair in 2008, and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2009. He has supervised numerous Ph.D. students and postdocs. His current work focuses on language contact and language history in South America. He is a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, Academia Europea, Max Planck Gesellschaft, and Board Language in Interaction Consortium. His major publications include: Bilingual Speech. A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000 (in collaboration with Willem Adelaar), The Languages of the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004, and Functional Categories. Cambridge University Press. 2008.

Rosario Gómez

Rosario Gómez is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph in the School of Languages and Literatures. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, specializing in Spanish and English linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, and English as a second language. She served as a board member of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her publications include: Gómez, Molina (Eds)Variación yeísta en el mundo hispánico, Iberoamericana Vervuert. 2013 , Gómez, Sellen, Taracena (Eds) Dialogos sobre los espacios: imaginados percibidos y construidos. Universidad National Autónoma de México. 2012 (With Sellen and Taracena). She is the co-ordinator of the Ecuadorian Sociolinguistics Corpus (Proyecto para Estudios Sociolingüísticos del Español de España y América - PRESEEA).