“{Spanish} Linguistics in (and for) Bilingual America: PSUxLING and Beyond”
John Lipski, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Penn State
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
Undergraduate research in linguistics is making exciting contributions in confronting some of the discipline’s most intractable issues. This can be eloquently demonstrated by focusing attention on Spanish and its interfaces in the country with the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population (the United States). The presentation covers both ongoing and potential lines of research on Spanish and its bilingual ecology in the U.S., together with resources and methods for studying written and spoken language and confronting misconceptions regarding (especially Spanish-English) bilingualism. Although highlighting Spanish, in line with the PSUxLING tradition and the linguistic demographics of the United States, everything except the language-specific examples holds for almost all research projects that deal with language contact, bilingualism, and heritage language.