Miguel Garcia is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, with concentration in Phonetics & Phonology, and Sociolinguistics. For the past years, he has been conducting research fieldwork in the Amazonian region of Peru, and also in Lima. His dissertation work focuses on Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS), a yet understudied variety in the literature of Hispanic Linguistics. Particularly, he examines PAS intonational system and its interaction with the structure of the sentences, with the ultimate goal of presenting an integrated analysis of PAS intonation.
In this talk, Miguel will provide details about his dissertation and the motivation of the study and will describe his research questions, including an initial analysis of the data collected in the city of Pucallpa, Peru, in the summer of 2014. Miguel will also offer some preliminary results, and will discuss the overall implications of this research. With this dissertation, he hopes to contribute to the recent and growing body of research on PAS by offering a unified analysis of PAS intonation based on experimental methods, going beyond early descriptions. Finally, this research gives insight into why PAS sounds different from other Spanish varieties.
This event is sponsored by the Continuity and Change in the Andes and Amazonia Working Group, as a part of the Center for Latin American Studies and the Humanities Institute
