Gegenwärtige Forschungsinteressen / Current Research Interests

Current research interests and research plans for the immediate future: My current focus is on two projects, both in the Hispanic field.

1) Migrations from Latin America in the 21st century: language and linguistic attitudes

Migrations are becoming especially abundant in the 21st century. Ibero-America has of course not been an exception to this trend and in fact, in addition to many other migratory movements, its territory is witnessing one of the largest displacements of people of our time reported in the history of the Western hemisphere: the so-called Venezuelan diaspora, which has involved nearly 5 million individuals. Such migratory processes leave a deep mark not only on the human beings involved but also on the host societies and perhaps on those from which migrants come, all of which more than justifies the need to delve deeper into their study.

• Study object: different twenty-first-century spaces of migration from Ibero-America selected according to their magnitude.
• Objectives:
• The specification of the possible changes in the language and linguistic attitudes of 21st century emigrants (arrived after the age of 15 and with more than 3 years of residence).
• Reflect on the types of changes that occur in the migratory processes, as well as on the motivations for change or non-change.
• Methods: conducting, recording and analysing interviews; using surveys and corpus studies.
• Investigates linguistic contact and change (phonic, morphosyntactic and lexical) and linguistic attitudes.

2) Morphosyntactic variants between linguistic change and error in 21st century Spanish.

The study has concentrated on 3 phenomena: a) agreement of haber with the direct object e.g. habían muchos chicos, b) lack of agreement in the direct complement between pronoun and object e.g. le dije a los chicos, and c) “analogical” conjugation of the second person preterite, e.g. tú dijistes. All of them are very widespread and frequent today. The RAE classifies them as general in broad (but unspecified) areas (2010: 779) and even prestigious scholars such as Gómez Torrego (2003: 429) propose considering the first not as error, but simply as a variable. Our study is not intended to be prescriptive, but to help answer the following questions: how frequent are they and how widespread are they diatopically and in social and age groups? Are there factors (syntactic, lexical or phonic) which play a role in their use? Has their use expanded or contracted diachronically?

• Methods: Corpus studies, interviews and survey research
• Deals with morphology and syntax, the phonological-syntactic interface and language change.