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Anna María Escobar

Profile picture for Anna María Escobar

Contact Information

University of Illinois; Spanish & Portuguese, 4080 Foreign Languages
Building, M/C 176; OFFICE: 4156 Foreign Languages Bldg.

Research Areas

Professor Emerita

Research Interests

Language Variation and Change
Contact Linguistics and Bilingualism
Morphology
Grammaticalization and Semantic Change
Spanish Sociolinguistics and Dialectology
Spanish-Quechua contact
Andean Sociolinguistics
Spanish Linguistics

Research Description

My academic pursuits focus primarily on offering a new interpretation of the history of Andean Spanish by initiating innovative social and linguistic analyses of colonial documents and modern varieties of Andean Peruvian Spanish, where the majority of Andean Spanish speakers reside. Although my research has focused primarily on the socio-historical and linguistic study of the development of Andean Spanish, the wider aim has been to understand the diversity of human verbal behavior in plurilingual societies, and how it influences change in language generally. As evidenced by my publications, this intellectual journey has evolved as it is informed by the latest theories on how languages change in contexts of language contact and social competition; by research in general theoretical linguistics, including cross-linguistic studies focused on grammatical change; and by my reading and learning from the work of scholars in other disciplines who focus on sociocultural history, especially in Latin America and other ex-colonial regions.

Education

Université de Grenoble III, France, Licence de Linguistique
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Bachiller
State University of New York at Buffalo, Ph.D. in Linguistics

Awards and Honors

LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2001-2002

Courses Taught

Reading Group: Social Dynamics of Language Variation and Change
Spanish Morphology
Hispanic Sociolinguistics
Contact Linguistics Seminar
Dynamics of Language Variation and Change Seminar
Grammaticalization Seminar
Oral Varieties of Spanish
Spanish in the U.S.
Structure of Spanish
Introduction to Spanish Linguistics
Practical Review of Spanish Grammar

Additional Campus Affiliations

Professor Emerita, Spanish and Portuguese
Professor Emerita, European Union Center
Professor Emerita, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Honors & Awards

LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2001-2002

Recent Publications

Escobar, A. M. (2023). Ethnocultural Languages in the Study of Language Contact: The Case of Amazonian Spanish. In M. Jara, R. Zariquiey, P. Valenzuela, & A. M. Escobar (Eds.), Brill's Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (pp. 20-46). (Brill's Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas; Vol. 18). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004514645_003

Jara, M., & Escobar, A. M. (2023). Introduction. In M. Jara, R. Zariquiey, P. Valenzuela, & A. M. Escobar (Eds.), Spanish Diversity in the Amazon: Dialect and Language Contact Perspectives (pp. 3-19). (Brill's Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas; Vol. 18). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004514645_002

Jara, M., Zariquiey, R., Valenzuela, P., & Escobar, A. M. (2023). Spanish Diversity in the Amazon: Dialect and Language Contact Perspectives. (Brill's Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas; Vol. 18). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004514645

Escobar, A. M., & Roy, J. (2022). Grammaticalization in the Evidential pathway of the Andean Spanish Present Perfect: Language contact as a trigger for language change. Isogloss, 8(4), Article 14. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.184

Escobar, A. M. (2022). The Emergence of Andean Spanish: Against the Odds. In S. Mufwene, & A. M. Escobar (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact: Volume 2: Multilingualism in Population Structure (pp. 618-634). (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009105965.030

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