Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics
Department of Romance Languages
| University of Georgia | Department of Romance Languages | Linguistics @ UGA | Home | |||
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CHAD
HOWE Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics Department of Romance Languages |
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| NEWS | RESEARCH | TEACHING | ROMANCE LINGUISTICS | ABOUT ME |
| Overview/Current Projects | ||||
| Publications | ||||
| Selected Presentations | ||||
| Advisees |
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| OVERVIEW / CURRENT PROJECTS |
Current CV Upcoming Presentations Dissertation: [Abstract] [Complete] Cross-dialectal Features of the Spanish Present Perfect: A Typological Analysis of Form and Function **This is a draft form of my dissertation, so please contact me before citing (though by all means feel free to cite it).** General Areas of Research: 1. Semantics and Pragmatics 2. Variationist Sociolinguistics 3. Portuguese Linguistics 4. Quechua Linguistics Perfect Puzzles In addition to my dissertation work, I have been involved in a number of projects pertaining to the semantics/pragmatics of the Present Perfect in Spanish and Portuguese. Despite a considerable literature concerning these forms (especially in Spanish), very little has been said about their formal properties (with some notable exceptions). Most recently I have been working on an explanation of the various patterns of grammaticalization attested with perfects among dialects of Spanish. [more to come...] Continuative Constructions in Romance Among the inventory of temporal elements in Romance languages is an adverbial construction utilizing the verb meaning 'to do' or 'to make', as shown below in (1) and (2). (1) Spanish a. Juan está en Madrid hace tres días. Juan be:3s in Madrid make:3s three days 'Juan has been in Madrid for three days.' b. Hace tres días que Juan está en Madrid. make:3s three days that Juan be:3s in Madrid 'Juan has been in Madrid for three days.' (2) Portuguese a. O João está no Rio faz tres días. the João be:3s in-the Rio (de Janeiro) make:3s three days 'João has been in Rio for three days.' b. Faz tres días que o João está no Rio. make:3s three days thay the João be:3s in-the Rio (de Janeiro) 'João has been in Rio for three days.' Among the interesting properties of these constructions are (i) their syntactic variability (i.e. sentence final or sentence initial w/ complementizer que ) and (ii) the implementation of the verb hacer/fazer in an invariably singular form. Across Romance languages, these constructions do not all exhibit the same properties. My work has dealt mainly with determing the factors that influence syntactic variation and looking at syntactic/semantic properties across Romance. Evidentiality in Spanish Perfects A number of sources (Klee & Ocampo 1995, Escobar 1997, Sánchez 2004, among others) have discussed the emergence of evidential uses of perfects, both past and present, in the Spanish spoken in the Andean region of South America. This emergence is primarily contributed to contact/bilingualism with Quechua (or Aymara), both of which have morphological means of marking evidentiality. I have argued that the type and nature of the emergence is distinct from that described in the literature arising mainly via convergence with specific verbal features rather than through strict parallels with the evential system, which is expressed through a set of enclitics. I am currently working on methods to quantify these effects and will soon be returning to Peru to gather additional data. Reference to Split Antecedents Over the last few years, I've been working on explaining some of the effects associated with the creation and processing of complex antecents, more specifically those constructed from disjoint elements in the discourse. For example: (1) Johni went to Mary'sj, and theyi+j watched a movie. (2) Wendyi recently got married. Theyi+j are on their honeymoon right now. (where j = Wendy's new husband) These types of antecedents have often been considered problematic from the viewpoint of standard theories of anaphora. A more exhaustive survey of the possibility of such antecedents combined with their somewhat frequent use in corpus data suggests that these types of antecedents are not "inferior", at least not as potential antecedents. Still, there is evidence to suggest that speakers do not process these types of antecedents in the same way as more 'standard' ones (see Sanford et al. 2004. Production and Comprehension Measures in Assessing Plural Object Formation. In The On-Line Study of Sentence Comprehension: Eyetracking, ERPs and Beyond, eds. Manuel Carreiras and Charles Clifton, Jr., 151-166). Languages like Spanish and Portuguese, where null anaphors are possible, are interesting in observing the anaphor/antecedent relationship in these cases. Thus far, I have argued that complex antecedents can in fact license null anaphors. Currently, I am working on developing an experimental method to test processing effects in these cases. |
| PUBLICATIONS |
Howe, Chad. 2007. A Semantic/Pragmatic Analysis of Present Perfects in Peninsular Spanish. Papers from the 39th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. by John Cihlar, Amy Franklin, Dave Kaiser, and Irene Kimbara. 144-61. (PDF) Howe, Chad and Scott Schwenter. 2003. Present perfect for preterite across Spanish dialects. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV-31, 9(2), ed. by Tara Sánchez, 61-76. (PDF) Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier and Chad Howe. 2003. Selective and Unselective Manner Operators. In Romance Linguistics: Theory and Acquisition, ed. by Perez-Leroux, Ana Teresa and Yves Roberge. Amsterdam , Netherlands : Benjamins. 131-47. (PDF) |
| SELECTED PRESENTATIONS |
2007a. "Eggcorns, Mercy Buckets and other re-analyses". Southeast Coastal Conference on Languages and Literatures. Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA. (w/ Gary Baker) 2006b. "Contact Induced Convergence in Spanish and Quechua". Ohio Latinamericanist Conference. Columbus, OH. 2006a. "The Spanish perfect(s): An integrated approach to form, context, and variation". Hispanic Linguistics Colloquium, Department of Spanish and Portguese. OSU. 2005c. "Reconsidering the (in)compatibility of past time adverbials with the present perfect”. 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. 2005a. "An ‘indirect' account for the ‘direct' evidential features of the Spanish perfect". 9th International Pragmatics Association Conference. Riva del Garda, Italy. 2004c. "Reexamining the Portuguese Perfect Puzzle". w/Patrícia Amaral. 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. (w/ Patrícia Amaral) 2004b. "Pragmatic conditions on Spanish Plural Anaphora: An experimental approach". 8th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 2004a. "The semantics of the perfect in Spanish past narratives". 23rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. University of California, Davis.2003. "A unified approach to (current) relevance in Present Perfects". The 33rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Indiana University , Bloomington, IN. |
| ADVISEES |
Javier Lluch (MA Projected Spring 2008) Thesis Topic: The Pragmatics of Intonation in Political Discourse William (Buck) Pennington (MA Projected Spring 2008) Thesis topic: Split antecedents and null subjects in Spanish Anne Rutter Sekanina (MA Projected Summer 2007) Thesis: "Address form selection amongst urban Spanish youth: The influence of the Cheli sociolect" Ninosca Pérez Minchola (MA Projected Summer 2007) Thesis: "El rol de la cortesía en entrevistas políticas conflictivas en la televisión peruana" |