Gabriela Caballero

Associate Professor and Undergraduate Advisor

University of California, San Diego - Linguistics

My research program has two main goals: i) to make original and lasting contributions to the description and documentation of indigenous languages of the Americas; and ii) to further our collective understanding of the nature of crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variation in phonology and morphology. My interest in crosslinguistic variation stems from my deep commitment to careful study of particular languages and the desire to bring data from lesser-studied languages to bear on topics in formal phonology and morphology, topics that tend to be addressed with data from an unrepresentative handful of better-known languages. My research interests in phonology and morphology recently extend to the psycholinguistic investigation of phonological and morphological processing in order to better understand patterns of morphophonological variation in morphologically complex languages.

Much of my research is based on data from Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara), a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Northern Mexico. I have been carrying out fieldwork on this language since 2003. Together with students, I have also worked with native speakers of Ixpantepec Nieves Mixtec (Tu'un Savi; Oto-Manguean) and Ja'a Kumiai (Yuman) in San Diego/Baja California. I am especially interested in linguistic description and collaborative language documentation projects whose products serve both academic linguists and indigenous communities.

I am currently Faculty Undergraduate Advisor. Together with Sharon Rose, I direct the Linguistics Field Research Lab and organize the Lab's Working Group. I am also part of the phonetics & phonology research community in San Diego (PhonCo).

As of January 2019, I am the new Vice-President/President Elect of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) and a panel member for the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), SOAS University of London.

More details of my current research projects can be found here.

CV (pdf)

Spring 2019 schedule

LIGN 293: Research Practicum (Graduate) - Mondays 9-10:50am, AP&M 2452

Office hours: Mondays, 11am-12pm - AP&M 4210 or meeting by appointment


Recent/upcoming talks and presentations:

  • October 5, 2018: Underdocumented language data corpus construction. Workshop tutorial for AMP 2018, UCSD. [w/Lucien Carroll (Cisco)]
  • October 19-21, 2018: Sound Systems of Latin America 3, UMass, Amherst
      • Direccionalidad y localidad en el condicionamiento de alomorfos en Tarahumara Central [Slides]
  • November 9, 2018: UC Santa Cruz, Department of Linguistics Colloquium
      • The interaction between lexical and grammatical tone in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) [w/Austin German]
  • November 30, 2018: U of Arizona, Department of Linguistics Colloquium
      • The interaction between lexical and grammatical tone in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) [w/Austin German]
  • January 3-6, 2019: Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas Annual Meeting, NYC
      • Grammatical tone patterns in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) [w/Austin German]
  • November 8, 2019: Georgetown University, Department of Linguistics Colloquium


Research groups/labs:

Last updated: April 10, 2019