Join the Center for Latin American Studies as we host Dr. Bruno Estigarribia, Professor of Spanish & Hispanic Linguistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for a lecture on indigenous languages. Dr. Estigarribia will reflect on his work writing A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani, published by UCL Press in 2020. You can find an abstract for his talk and Dr. Estigarribia's bio below.
If you cannot join us in person, please register below to receive the Zoom link.
You can access Dr. Estigarribia's presentation below:
Abstract
Every scientific enterprise has, as we know, far-reaching implications beyond its own somewhat circumscribed conclusions. Linguistic research intersects on the one hand with issues of language identity and language ownership, and on the other hand with political issues and language planning. I plan to share with you in this talk part of my work on the grammar of Guarani, informed by my studies of its five centuries long contact with Spanish, and how even a "purely scientific" description of the language needs to come terms with these larger issues.
Bio
Bruno Estigarribia completed a Maítrise in Language Sciences at the Université Paris V-René Descartes-Sorbonne in 2001 and an M.A. in Linguistics at Stanford University in 2005. He obtained his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2007, with a dissertation investigating children’s acquisition of the syntax of English questions. From 2007 to 2009, he was a National Institutes of Health T32 Postdoctoral Fellow, working on the language and cognitive development of children with neurodevelopment disabilities. He continued this work as Research Faculty in the Cognitive Science Program in UNC’s Psychology Department. Now he is a Professor in the Department of Romance Studies, in the Hispanic Linguistics Program. His most recent research has focused on aspects of the structure of Argentinian Spanish, on the description of Paraguayan Guarani, and on the contact between these two languages. He has recently published the Open Access reference grammar A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani with UCL Press. His work has been published in the International Journal of American Linguistics, Glossa, Probus, Journal of Language Contact, Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Child Language, Cognitive Science, Applied Psycholinguistics, Journal of Speech Language, and Hearing Research, and the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, among others. His current project is a typologically-informed linguistic description of Rusitène, a southern Italo-Romance language of the archaic “Area Lausberg”, issued from the 11c. Latinization of Greek-speaking communities, and of which Bruno is matrilineally a heritage speaker.
This event is made possible thanks to CLAS's NRC Title VI funds to support knowledge of Latin America.
