On Wednesday, September 15th, Dr. Sandro Sessarego will give a lecture entitled "Contact-driven restructuring at the interface: Aspects of variable phi-agreement across generations & domains."
This event, co-sponsored by CLAS and the Department of Linguistics, is part of the Changelings discussion group, but anyone is welcome to attend. Email CLAS Assistant Director Mark Hoff (hoff.96@osu.edu) to receive the Zoom link.
Talk abstract:
This talk analyzes gender agreement variation in the Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase. Results show a case of cross-generational change, consisting of the systematic substitution of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Highland Bolivian Spanish ones (Sessarego 2014). This work offers a theoretical framework capable of accounting for the variability of a process driven by social factors through a path that is highly constrained by syntactic ones (Sessarego 2021). Findings are further compared and contrasted with parallel studies on other Afro-Andean varieties: Afro-Ecuadorian Spanish and Afro-Peruvian Spanish (Sessarego 2013, 2015).
About the speaker:
Sandro Sessarego is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He works primarily in the fields of contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax, and human rights. The linguistic study of the Afro-Latino Vernaculars of the Americas (ALVAs)—the languages that developed in Latin America from the contact of African languages, Spanish and Portuguese in colonial times—and the sociohistorical analysis of their evolution form the main themes of his research program. In particular, his investigation combines linguistic, sociohistorical, legal and anthropological insights to cast light on the nature and origins of these contact varieties.
