Speakers

Dr. César Félix-Brasdefer is Professor of Spanish at Indiana University. His research looks at issues of pragmatics and discourse analysis in first and second language contexts. He adopts a pragmatic-discursive perspective to analyze language use in social interaction. He has conducted research on various aspects of second language pragmatics such as pragmatic development, pragmatic transfer, language proficiency, assessment, and instruction. Dr. Félix-Brasdefer is interested in pragmatic development in study abroad contexts as well as in immigrant contexts, such as heritage language learning. He also examines intercultural communicative competence in foreign language classrooms and study abroad programs. From a pragmatic variation perspective, he examines intra-lingual variation in different regions of the United States, Mexico, Spain, and Central America. In particular, he investigates the language of service encounters in cross-cultural and intercultural settings. He employs different research methodologies, such as the ethnographic method and a variety of experimental methods, to examine pragmatic phenomena in formal and non-formal contexts.

Dr. Gillian Lord is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at University of Florida. She is from New York originally but she have travelled and/or lived in Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Peru.

Professionally, she has taught all levels of Spanish, from beginning language on up to graduate seminars in Hispanic Linguistics. For a long time she directed our lower division Spanish program, working to design basic language courses, train graduate instructors, and improve the language requirement experience for UF students. She also served as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies from 2010-2021. Her primary research focus is on how we can teach, and how students learn, Spanish as a second/foreign language in the most effective and enjoyable ways. She has done work with computer-assisted language learning, study abroad, and classroom environments. Her real passion is the acquisition of the Spanish sound system.

Dr. Almeida Jacqueline Toribio is a native of the Dominican Republic, who was raised in New York. She earned an M.A. in Linguistic & Cognitive Science from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University. She has held tenure-stream positions at The University of California at Santa Barbara and The Pennsylvania State University as well as a professorship at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute. She is currently appointed as Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at The University of Texas at Austin, with affiliations in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies and the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies. Professor Toribio’s dossier reflects scholarship in the areas of language contact and variation and a trajectory from theoretical to more empirically-based approaches. She is perhaps best known for research in the area multilingual code-switching, where she has addressed morpho-syntactic, phonetic, and discursive-pragmatic mixing patterns among diverse populations. She currently co-directs the Bilingual Annotation Tasks research group, a cohort of students from the humanities and natural sciences, whose aim is to bring the tools of Natural Language Processing to the analysis of multilingual texts. A parallel line of research, which she has pursued for over several decades, examines the speech of residents of rural areas of the Dominican Republic and their compatriots in established and new receiving communities in U.S. diasporic settings. This research records the incidence and dissemination of unique language structures that serve important functions as indices of ethnicity, race, gender, among other social variables.