A couple of our faculty have forthcoming edited volumes in interesting areas of linguistic research:
Rajiv Rao (2020) – Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain.
Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain brings together scholars working on a wide range of aspects of the Spanish sound system and how their coexistence with another language in speech communities across the Hispanophone world influences their manifestation. Drawing upon seminal works in the fields of language contact in general, Spanish in contact with indigenous and regional languages, and laboratory approaches tied to the languages in question, the volumes contents employ acoustic and quantitative approaches, as well as both controlled and spontaneous data elicitation procedures, to shed light on how linguistic, historical, and social variables drive contact phenomena, and in turn, shape specific varieties of Spanish. It will pique the interest of researchers and students of fields such as contact linguistics, language variation and change, segmental and suprasegmental phonetics and phonology, and sociolinguistics.
Grant Armstrong (2021) (with co-editor J.E. MacDonald) – Unraveling the Complexity of SE.
This book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of Romance SE constructions by combining both diachronic and synchronic theoretical perspectives along with a range of empirical data from different languages and dialects.
The collection, divided into four sections, proposes that SE constructions may be divided into one class that is the result of grammaticalization of a reflexive pronoun up the syntactic tree, from Voice and above, and another class that has resulted from the reanalysis of reflexive and anticausative morphemes as an argument expletive or verbal morpheme generated in positions from Voice and below. The contributions, while varied in both empirical content and theoretical approach, all serve to highlight different aspects of the overarching idea that SE constructions have evolved from these two distinct grammaticalization paths.
The book appeals to researchers and academics in the field and closes with a unified approach to various SE constructions that makes important use of its status as a verbal morpheme. In addition to aligning a novel string of empirical contributions under a new theoretical umbrella, a clear research direction emerges from this volume based on the morphosyntactic nature of SE itself: Is it a clitic, an agreement morpheme, or a verbal morpheme?
Also, Linguistics Ph.D. alumna Zhe (Tina) Chen has a forthcoming article in the journal Syntax, co-authored with faculty member Yafei Li: “Bipartite Agentivity Expression in Chinese Passives.”
For a list of more highlighted faculty books, see our Faculty Publication page.