SPN 368C / Unique # 45780 / Fall 2018 Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30-11:00 in MEZ 1.208 Contact Spanish in the United States Professor Almeida Jacqueline Toribio Email:
[email protected] Office hours: Mondays & Tuesday 11-12:30 and by appointment, in BEN 3.150 Course description • This course presents an overview of the language situation of established and emerging Spanish-speaking communities in the United States. To that end, we address the historical presence of Spanish and the current demographic profiles of its speakers; we consider the diversity of varieties of U.S. Spanish in the domains of lexicon, phonology/phonetics, and morpho-syntax; and we examine the consequences of dialect and language contact via analyses of phenomena such as borrowing, calquing, code-switching, and convergence. Attention is also devoted to the social factors that modulate Spanish language usage in public domains. In particular, we explore cultural productions and representations of U.S. Spanish and its speakers, as manifested in the across media and artistic forms. Course requirements • Attendance and active participation: Careful preparation and discussion of readings and completion of in-class and at-home activities. • Written assignments: 60%. Assignments designed to assess the student’s knowledge of pertinent concepts and ability to analyze linguistic data and to communicate findings in Spanish. • Research presentation [10%] and written report [30%]. Original research that analyzes a small set of language data (e.g., a YouTube video, speeches by public figures, open corpora, survey data, samples from social networks, excerpts from film or television programs, etc.). The results must be presented as a concise research report (2500-3000 words) that includes an introduction motivating the project, a review of a limited body of relevant literature, a description of the methods and analysis, an accurate representation of results, and a discussion of the significance of the findings.