Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish Linguistics
he/él
About
My research focuses on issues in the phonetics and phonology of different varieties of Spanish from a theoretical perspective, employing laboratory methods to validate my claims. My earliest publications focused on question intonation in Peninsular Spanish, working primarily within the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonational structure. More recently, I have begun to explore sociophonetic variation in Andalusian Spanish, spoken in southern Spain. I am particularly interested in understanding the linguistic factors that differentiate the Western and Eastern sub-varieties of Andalusian Spanish.
I have published articles in Journal of Phonetics, Laboratory Phonology, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Phonetica, Language and Speech, and Probus. In 2016, I published a co-edited volume entitled Intonational grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields, through John Benjamins Publishing Company (co-editors: Meghan Armstrong of University of Massachusetts & Maria del Mar Vanrell of Freie Universität Berlin).
At Michigan, I have embarked on a collaborative endeavor that examines the language and history of an Afrikaans-Spanish bilingual community who live in Patagonia, Argentina. This project is funded through the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory. Our project title is "From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of displacement". My collaborators in linguistics are Andries Coetzee (Linguistics) and Lorenzo García-Amaya (RLL).
