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Modern Languages Commons

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Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

2017

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Modern Languages

“You Live In The United States, You Speak English,” Decían Las Maestras How New Mexican Spanish Speakers Enact, Ascribe, And Reject Ethnic Identities, Katherine Christoffersen, Naomi L. Shin Oct 2017

“You Live In The United States, You Speak English,” Decían Las Maestras How New Mexican Spanish Speakers Enact, Ascribe, And Reject Ethnic Identities, Katherine Christoffersen, Naomi L. Shin

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

New Mexico’s unique linguistic and ethnic heritage is the result of a complex history of colonization characterized by oppression. This chapter examines how, in this context of oppression, New Mexican Spanish speakers negotiate ethnic identities through bilingual talk-in-interaction. The study takes an ethnomethodological approach to identity as something that people ‘do’ (Widdicombe, 1998) and analyzes how New Mexican Spanish speakers ‘do’ ethnic identities. The present analysis is based on a subset of the New Mexico and Colorado Spanish Survey (Vigil & Bills, 2000), including 30 fully transcribed audio-recordings of semi-structured interviews with New Mexican Spanish speakers. A positioning analysis of …


Positional Verbs In Colonial Valley Zapotec, John Foreman, Brooke D. Lillehaugen Apr 2017

Positional Verbs In Colonial Valley Zapotec, John Foreman, Brooke D. Lillehaugen

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes the system of positional verbs (e.g., ‘be standing’ and ‘be lying’) in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ), a historical form of Valley Zapotec preserved in archival documents written during the Mexican colonial period. We provide data showing that positional verbs in CVZ have unique morphological properties and participate in a defined set of syntactic constructions, showing that positional verbs formed a formal class of verbs in Valley Zapotec as early as the mid-1500s. This work contributes to the typological literature on positional verbs, demonstrating the type of morphosyntactic work that can be done with a corpus of CVZ …