Description:

This presentation features my individual and collaborative scholarship along two distinct lines of linguistic inquiry. One strand attends to language variation, discerning the salient phonological and syntactic properties that uniquely characterize the Spanish spoken in the Dominican Republic and revealing the performative functions of this stigmatized dialect in the U.S. diaspora. A second thread traces my work on the nature of phenomena such as code-switching and convergence, biasing the focus on the means by which multilingual corpora are gathered, inspected, and interpreted. These seemingly dissimilar endeavors are unified in the common purpose of illuminating language forms and practices that remain largely understudied or misunderstood. As will be shown, such investigations promise foundational data that can serve to advance linguistic research— e.g., refining theories of representation and change and informing development of tools and technologies—and, equally as important, they can serve to uplift minoritized and underserved populations.