SPRING 2022

Welcome to our 2022-Spring SDLVC Calendar!

During this semester, we will go back to face-to-face Meetings (unless noted). Our meetings will take place biweekly on Wednesdays, 5:00-6:00 p.m., starting February 16, 2022 in Room 3092C FLB Building. If you are interested in joining our reading group, please write to Robin Turner, our graduate assistant.

02/09/2021 – Organizational Meeting


 02/16/2022 – Conference Practice Presentation (virtual meeting)

  • Pye, Jonathan (Spanish & Portuguese, U of Illinois-Urbana) Discombobulating Sofia Vergara: The ideological function of accent in chat show discourse,” to be presented at the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society, February 25-26, 2022.
  • Castro Cantu, Sara (Spanish & Portuguese, U of Illinois-Urbana) “Constructing identity through language: Perceptions of English and Spanish fluency among bilingual speakers,” to be presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium (SoSy), February 24, 2022.

02/23/2022 – Frequency in Language Contact Processes

Bullock, Barbara E., Jacqueline Serigos & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (2021) Exploring a Loan Translation and Its Consequences in an Oral Bilingual Corpus. Journal of Language Contact 13, 612-635. [PDFhttps://brill.com/view/journals/jlc/13/3/article-p612_612.xml

ABSTRACT: This work applies computational tools that have been used to model loanwords in newspaper corpora to an analysis of a loan translation in an oral bilingual corpus. The explicit goal of the contribution is to argue that a specific collocation found in a corpus of Spanish spoken in Texas, agarrar+NP (e.g., agarrar ayuda), is a loan translation that is calqued on English get+np support verb constructions (e.g., get help). We base our argument on the frequency and the linguistic distribution of the nonconventional usage within and between corpora and on the factors that favor its use. Our findings show that the overall frequency of agarrar is the same in Spanish in Texas as it is in the benchmark monolingual corpus of Mexican Spanish but that it is used differently in the two varieties, a difference that has grammatical, as well as semantic, ramifications.


02/24-26/2022 – Conferences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


03/09/2022 – Methodologies in Studying Language Perception

McGowan, Kevin B. & Anna M. Babel (2020) Perceiving isn’t believing: Divergence in levels of sociolinguistic awareness. Language in Society 49(2), 231-256. [PDF]   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404519000782

Presentation in ABRALIN AO VIDEO by Anna Babel: ‘What do we mean by ‘awareness’? A sociolinguistic perspective.

ABSTRACT: The influence of social knowledge on speech perception is a question of interest to a range of disciplines of language research. This study combines experimental and qualitative approaches to investigate whether the various methodological and disciplinary threads of research on this topic are truly investigating the same phenomenon to provide converging evidence in our understanding of social listening. This study investigates listeners’ perceptions of Spanish and Quechua speakers speaking Spanish in the context of a contact zone between these two languages and their speakers in central Bolivia. The results of a pair of matched-guise vowel discrimination tasks and subsequent interviews demonstrate that what people perceive, as measured by experimental tasks, is not necessarily what they believe they hear, as reported in narrative responses to interview prompts. Multiple methodological approaches must be employed in order to fully understand how we perceive language at diverging levels of sociolinguistic awareness. (Perception, sociophonetics, sociolinguistics, awareness, Andean Spanish)


03/23/2022 – Social Dynamics and Personal Narratives

Osborne, Dana (2021) The semiotics of the deictic field: Reckoning language and experience in East Los Angeles. Journal of Linguistic Geography 9(1), 40-49. [PDF]  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2021.4

ABSTRACT: This analysis examines the ways in which a single speaker, Ana, born in mid-century East Los Angeles, organizes and reflects upon her experiences of the city through language. Ana’s story is one that sheds light on the experiences of many Mexican Americans who came of age at a critical time in a transitioning L.A., and the slow move of people who had been up until mid-century relegated largely in and around racially and socioeconomically segregated parts of L.A. These formative experiences are demonstrated to have informed the ways that speakers parse the social and geographical landscape along several dimensions, and this analysis interrogates the symbolic value of a special category of everyday language, deixis, to reveal the intersection between language and social experience in the cityscape of L.A. In this way, it is analytically possible to not only approach the habituation and reproduction of specific deictic fields as indexical of the ways that speakers parse the city, but also to demonstrate the ways in which key moments in the history of the city have shaped the emergence and meaning of those fields.


04/06/2022 – Dialect contact and Conversation Analysis

Raymond, Chase Wesley (2018) On the relevance and accountability of dialect: Conversation Analysis and dialect contact. Journal of Sociolinguistics 22(2), 161-189. [PDF  https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12277

ABSTRACT: The present study seeks to illustrate how the theory and method of conversation analysis (CA) can be used to begin to unpack the notion of ‘contact’ in contact linguistics research. After reviewing language and dialect contact as they are traditionally conceptualized, we describe an additional set of questions inspired by CA’s fundamental concern with relevance and accountability. It is argued that, by analyzing the structure and design of turn-by-turn talk in situations of dialect contact, we are able to investigate how co-participants themselves go about carving out the boundaries of their respective dialects, how they can link those dialects to social identities, and how those social identities can become ‘procedurally consequential’ for the design of subsequent talk between the interlocutors. It is ultimately hypothesized that relevance and accountability at the micro-interactional level may provide new insight into the moment-by-moment mechanisms that bring about the comparatively more macro-level outcomes of dialect contact (e.g. leveling, koineization, etc.) that have been previously identified in contact linguistics research.


04/20/2022 – Language Policy, Linguistic Activism, and Gender Inclusive Writing

Burnett, Heather & Céline Pozniak (2021) Political dimensions of gender inclusive writing in Parisian Universities. Journal of Sociolinguistics 25(5), 808-831. [PDF]  https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12489

ABSTRACT: Écriture inclusive (EI) has long been the topic of public debates in France. These debates have become more intense in recent years, often focusing on the higher education system and culminating in the formulation of three separate laws banning it for public administration. In this paper, we investigate the foundations of these conflicts through a large quantitative corpus study of the (non)use of EI in Parisian undergraduate brochures. Our results suggest that Parisian university professors use EI not only to ensure gender neutral reference but also as a tool to construct their political identities. We show that both the use of EI and its particular forms are conditioned by how brochure writers position themselves on non gender-related-related issues within the French university’s political landscape, which explains how conflicts surrounding a linguistic practice have become understood as conflicts about larger issues in French society. Our paper thus provides new information to be taken into account in the formulation and promotion of nonsexist language policies and sheds light on how feminist linguistic activism and its opposition are deeply intertwined with other kinds of social activism in present-day France.