Research and Innovation

This text considers contemporary China’s language ideology and how it supports China as a rising global power player. It examines the materialization of this ideology as China’s language order unfolds on two front, promoting Putonghua domestically and globally, alongside its economic growth and military expansion. Within the conceptual framework of language ideology and language order and using PRC policy documents, education annals, and fieldwork, this book explores how China’s language ideology is related to its growing global power as well as its domestic and global outreaches. It also addresses how this ideology has been materialized as a language order in terms of institutional development and support, and what impact these choices are having on China and the world. Focusing on the relationship between language ideology and language order, the book highlights a closer and coherent linguistic association between China’s domestic drive and global outreach since the turn of the century.

Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, professor Spanish and Portuguese in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, received a grant from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) to host an symposium at the University of Maryland in Spring 2019 on Spanish Caribbean literature and culture.

This proposal describes the design and organization of an experimental symposium focused on the critical reconsideration of periods, situations and texts that have been polemics in the modern and contemporaneous Spanish Caribbean. It is, in addition, an intriguing proposal for its promise to combine esthetics and policy, literary critique and analysis of the current political, economic and environmental uncertainties that confront the societies of the Caribbean.

In Latin America, the Caribbean occupies a secondary or inferior position, and is often overlooked.  This project makes a significant effort to increase the academic visibility of this region, therefore it obtained a high score in the evaluation of the potential of its impact criteria.

The organizers and participants in the symposium, who come from different countries in the Hispanic Caribbean and other countries, show an excellent transnational and hemispheric commitment that includes the United States, Canada, Europe and Latin America, and seek to be involved in the proposed discussion and to supply texts to established and emerging academics, from a great variety of institutions. In summary, it is an original project, it is very well developed and is clear in its proposals, objectives and use of the budget.

 Selection Committee:

The project selection committee in this cycle was presided over by Mara Viveros-Vigoya, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Vice President of LASA and President-elect, and included the participation of María Victoria Murillo de Columbia University; Emiliana Cruz, from Ciesas, México DF, Vivian Andrea Martínez-Díaz, Universidad de los Andes and Jaime A. Alves of CSI/CUNY and Universidad ICESI/Colombia, former winner of the FORD-LASA grant in 2015.

Louis Malle's collaboration with oceanographer and environmental activist Jacques Cousteau on "The Silent World" was a training ground and foundational work for the budding French director in 1956. The specific treatment of three elements -the presence of recording technology, the observation of marine life, the use of sound- pervading the film as a documentary feature had a significant influence on Malle's narrative and aesthetic choices as soon as he turned to fiction two years later, with "Elevator to the Gallows" and "The Lovers" (and on to his early 1960s films -"Zazie dans le métro", "A Very Private Affair", "The Fire Within"). Malle's interest in the mediatisation of vision, his 'mechanistic" conception of cinema, his acute perception of the representational and narrational inadequacy of verbal language, his ethnographic concern (shared with Jean Rouch) for "an ethic of looking and listening", his disenchanted gaze on the man-machine, his shift between nature (animals) and mankind (in particular children) -all speak to a constant engagement with issues of realism, truth and objectivity, and, ultimately, to a more assertive political thrust than is ordinarily perceived in his early work.

Laura Demaría, professor of Spanish, has published her first novel. 

“A diferencia de Utopía, la isla prodigiosa que se desea y es un sueño, St. Louis y todos los lugares de este blues siempre han estado presentes sencilla y abrumadoramente. Aquí no se inventa nada, ni se desea lo inencontrable. "St. Louis Blues" afirma la inmanencia de la vida, describiendo, con palabras discretas y casi dolorosas, esos secretos con que esta va construyendo su evidencia: nuestros encuentros, nuestras pasiones, nuestras soledades, todo aparente, pero inasible; todo resonante pero incomprensible. Esta inmanencia nos rodea y también nos invade; pero ¿qué sentido tiene? Laura Demaría nos ofrece una narración de permanente suspenso: no duda que lo existente tenga sentido; pero ¿dónde está?, ¿qué cara tiene?, ¿es el lugar donde estoy y el ostro que veo en el espejo?, ¿o son también los lugares de los otros y sus pasiones? ¿Hay una respuesta? Con una sabiduría gozosa, esta narración recorre estas supremas preguntas.” - Jorge Aguilar Mora, professor emeritus of Spanish.

A phonological priming experiment reports inhibition for Russian prime-target pairs with onset overlap in native speakers. When preceded by the phonological prime /kabɨla/, the target /kabak/ (кобыла – КАБАК, mare – PUB) takes longer to respond than the same target preceded by a phonologically unrelated word. English-speaking late learners of Russian also show inhibition, but only for high-frequency prime-target pairs. Conversely, they show facilitation for low-frequency pairs. In semantic priming (e.g. carnation – DAISY), facilitation is observed for the same two lexical frequency ranges both in native speakers and learners of Russian, suggesting that the primes and targets in the low-frequency range are familiar to the nonnative participants. We interpret nonnative phonological facilitation for low-frequency words as evidence for sublexical processing of less familiar words that is accompanied by reduced lexical competition in nonnative lexical access. We posit that low lexical competition is due to unfaithful, or fuzzy phonolexical representations: nonnative speakers are unsure about the exact phonological form of low-frequency words. Such unfaithful representations are not strongly engaged in lexical competition and selection. High reliance on sublexical rather than lexical processing may be a general property of nonnative word recognition in case when the words are less familiar and have a low level of entrenchment.

Central America has long been pivotal to U.S. economic and geopolitical interests and the U.S. political and cultural imaginary because of the isthmus’s geographical location. Combined, U.S. interventions, local armed conflicts, and the migration flow from Central America produce the conditions that make possible the production of a U.S. Central American literature. In their works, U.S. Central American writers such as Tanya Maria Barrientos, Francisco Goldman, Héctor Tobar, Marcos McPeek Villatoro, and poets like Maya Chinchilla, Lorena Duarte, Leticia Hernández-Linares, and William Archila, among others, not only give visibility and voice to an array of U.S. Central American subjectivities but also contribute to an expansion of Latina/o literary history, now forced to reckon with Central America. This chapter examines the production of U.S. Central American literature before and beyond the age of neoliberalism.

This paper presentation investigates the concept of "bonding" through indexicality in membership registration confirmations and order acknowledgments via email from companies in the United States and Japan. These texts are part of a larger corpus of business email correspondence collected by the author in 2011-2017. The research builds upon recent papers on the topic of "bonding" as analyzed from theoretical perspectives such as stance-taking (Jaffe 2009), positioning (Bamberg 1997, 2004), and the concept of “ba” from emancipatory pragmatics (Fujii 2012). These two sub-genres of discourse are highlighted for several reasons. First, they are essential to the establishment of a "relationship" via email between company and customer, even though most of these texts were probably auto-generated upon receipt of a membership registration or placement of an order. Moreover, the regularity with which American and Japanese companies disseminate such emails allows us to perceive the generic conventions at work in the two languages, and in particular to identify the range of indexical expressions used to point to referents in the discourse. Finally, these emails reveal that the discursive practices with respect to indexicality differ in these contexts, with person deixis predominating in English, and social deixis in Japanese. Wetzel (2011) and Dean (2009) have demonstrated the fundamental importance of pronouns such as "you" in public signs and advertising texts in English. In contrast, Ide and Ueno (2011) have underscored the importance of linguistic expressions such as nouns with honorific prefixes and honorific predicative elements, which reflect the concepts wakimae ("discernment") and ba ("field"), when Japanese "place themselves in relation to the[ir] addressees in daily practice." This paper illustrates the indexical process of "bonding" between company and customer through these respective linguistic techniques in Japanese and American English business discourse.

The dissertation starts with a historical and philosophical survey to understand the etymological sense of the word and to see how ethical values, law norms, cultural and social aspects have transformed the concept accordingly.Such universal theme is seen through various scholars’ perspectives from ancient Greek pre-socratic philosopher Zenone di Elea to the contemporary American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the Indian economist Amartya Sen that decline such complex term with the ability to reason, living a good life, democracy and equality, with the access to health, education and income. The research continues with an interview to four different groups of people: elementary school children, teenagers, adults and over 65 persons that answer to a few questions about examples of recognition, denial and improvement of dignity in their lives. In the last part of the survey five adults are interviewed about dignity at work with a series of questions ranging from their role inside the company, their relationships with staff and management, information, support, wellness, safety at workplace. Five more people are interviewed on their health experiences with physicians and at the hospital to get their feedback on help, practical information, wellness and empathy. Such analysis is deepened at school with five teachers’ interview on their approach to teaching attitudes, agreement on education vision and mission, collaborative approach with the principal staff and student care, respect, tolerance, inclusion, sense of community. Another group of five adults have responded to questions related to family relationships, transmitted values, use of technology, family lifestyle, freedom, privacy, sharing perspectives and mutual respect. Data analysis and comments conclude the study.

The study focuses on the ways in which these Hispanic artists use linguistic and stylistic resources within a heteroglossic framework to perform resistance identities while highlighting the differences and similarities between first and second-generation immigrant participants. The speakers' linguistic and textual displays in Instagram are geared by and express translocal affective and sociocultural alignments and affinities while resisting hegemonic ideologies of racial categorization and stigmatization of Latinxs in the US. Theoretically and methodologically the investigationstudy draws on sociolinguistics, language ideologies, critical race theory, and discourse analysis. Special attention is given to aspects of translocality and Hip-Hop Nation Language (HHNL, Alim, 2009), agency, and the ways in which they themselves make sense of and account for their actions through linguistic awareness. Within a mixed-methodology framework, this study criticizes the use of Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) and highlights the analytical usefulness of triangulation.

This review discusses a number of recent studies focusing on the role of phonological and morphological structure in lexical access of Russian words by non-native speakers. This research suggests that late second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers of Russian in several ways: Lower-proficiency L2 learners rely on unfaithful, or fuzzy, phonological representations of words, which are caused either by problems with encoding difficult phonological contrasts, such as hard and soft consonants, or by uncertainty about the phonological form and form-meaning mappings for low-frequency words. In processing morphologically complex inflected words, L2 learners rely on decomposition to access the lexical meaning through the stem and may ignore the information carried by the inflection. The reviewed findings have broader implications for the understanding of nonnative word recognition, and the role of L2 proficiency in lexical processing.