Linguistics Seminar Series
Fall 2025
We are thrilled to announce the Linguistics Seminar Series for the Fall 2025 semester. The Linguistics Seminar Series features faculty scholars who are involved in language-related research. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Writing & Language Studies and the Office for Bilingual Integration.
The presentations will be hosted each Tuesday from 12:30-1:45pm in Edinburg (EHABW 1.406), Brownsville (BSABH 2.112A) and via Zoom. We provide pizza and soda for in-person attendees. Check the flyer or contact john.foreman@utrgv.edu for Zoom information.
This semester includes three special guest speakers who will visit the Edinburg campus on Sept. 16, Oct. 7, and Nov. 18!
Please join us this Fall semester as we learn from and with our featured speakers!
Upcoming Events
Sharing Our Stories: A Journey through Mexican-American Literature and Publishing
Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura will visit UTRGV to share the inspiring trajectory of her career—from growing up as a fronteriza in the US-Mexico borderlands to becoming a Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and the newly appointed Director of Arte Público Press, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious publisher of U.S. Hispanic literature. Arte Público Press has been instrumental in publishing foundational voices from South Texas, including Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, and Xavier Garza. During her visit, Dr. Baeza Ventura will highlight the significance of Mexican American literature within the broader landscape of U.S. literary and cultural history and will address the current challenges facing scholars working to preserve and promote Mexican American cultural heritage
Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura is Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and Deputy Director of Arte Público Press, the nation’s leading publisher of U.S. Latino literature. In her role at Arte Público, she oversees the editorial production of numerous publications and has personally translated more than 50 children’s picture books and 12 young adult volumes, significantly expanding access to bilingual and bicultural literature. She is also the co-founder and co-director, alongside Dr. Carolina Villarroel, of the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Project—an innovative initiative that recovers and promotes Latino documentary heritage that has been historically silenced, marginalized, or overlooked. Dr. Baeza Ventura’s leadership extends beyond publishing and academia: she serves on the boards of several national organizations and scholarly publications, including the Association for Documentary Editing and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, a landmark archival project dedicated to preserving and disseminating Latino contributions to American history and culture.
Puro 956: Slang in the RGV
This paper presents a pilot study exploring the current forms and functions of slang used in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) of South Texas. Slang is difficult to precisely define, but as Dumas and Lighter (1978:13) note, it is “an [indispensable] term…to name a body of lexemes that are distinct from standard [language], jargon, and all other kinds of informal uses such as regionalisms and colloquialisms and which are identifiable primarily by the intent (or the perceived intent) of the speaker or writer to break with established linguistic convention.” Slang identifies one, generally subconsciously, as belonging to a particular informal social group.
Studying slang illuminates the ways language can change, the impact of technology on linguistic change, and the linguistic resources speakers have at their disposal to manipulate and recreate language (Heiman 1967, Mattiello 2008, Danesi 2010, Roth-Gordon 2020, inter alia). It can also help us track various linguistic identities and how they are constructed (Drake 1980, Godley & Carpenter 2007, Slotta 2016, Izmaylova & Zamaletdinova 2017, inter alia) and, of particular interest for our area, help researchers better understand how languages in contact interact (Murray 1996, Rodríguez González 1996, Rodríguez González & Stenström 2011, García 2017, inter alia).
The ultimate goal of our project is to undertake an in-depth documentation of English and Spanish slang as used throughout the RGV by surveying community members from all ages and across social identities. To work out and refine our methodologies, we started with a pilot study collecting slang terms in use among the authors of this paper, the current members of the Cross-Linguistics Undergraduate Board at UTRGV, expanded and corroborated with examples of slang taken from the Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa), a digital archive of sociolinguistic interviews conducted in English and Spanish with residents of the RGV (Christoffersen & Ciller 2024, Christoffersen & Bessett 2019).
In our pilot study, we observe that much of the slang we brainstormed is widespread among those our age, occurring well beyond the RGV. This is to be expected in our modern times of social media and hyperconnectivity. However, not all slang we generated is known or used by the entire group, reflecting the fact that slang usage reflects particular group affiliations and “people who belong to more than one…group might use very different slang depending on who they’re with” (Munro 2009:7). We also identified a number of linguistic devices in the formation of our slang terms, including words derived from clipping (shortening words), metaphorical extensions, synecdoche (using a part to name the whole), eponyms (terms from proper names), reduplication (repetition of words/word parts), acronymy (use of initials), conversion (changing part of speech categories), and borrowing between languages (not only Spanish and English but incorporation of words from other languages as well).
This pilot study provides an initial foundation for our project, helping us to refine our methodology and to learn about the linguistics of neologisms and slang and research into language and identity, setting the stage for success with our future project.
Dándole voz a la Mariquita: Singing Latina Womanhood and the Immigrant Experience
My plan is to share about my experience as a singer and monologuist for a bilingual production called SALSA Lotería, an all-women monologue series comprised of seven Latina immigrants and post-migrants. I will discuss how the 1920s Mexican song, "Adiós Mariquita Linda" - which I sang as part of my contribution to the production -- transformed into an anthem for the immigrant experience through lyrical (textual) resignification during the course of our performances in the Boulder, Colorado and surrounding areas. I will elaborate on how this lyrical resignification was directly tied to transgenerational experiences of grief, nostalgia, and resilience among migrant women.
Dr. Teresita Lozano is an Assistant Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. A native of the El Paso, Texas – Juárez, Chihuahua borderland, Dr. Lozano engages in research that explores the intersections between music, migration, cultural memory, religion, and identity. Her current monograph project centers on the undocumented migrant experience in the U.S.-Mexico transborder region. A passionate advocate for musical and community activism, she has served as a performer and “border music” specialist for projects in public education and immigrant rights movements. Prior to her position at UTRGV, she served as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Ethnomusicology at West Virginia University. She is also an alumna of the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Museum Studies Program. She maintains a professional performance career as a flutist and vocalist in multiple global traditions. Dr. Lozano holds a BME with an emphasis in flute from Baylor University and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology (Musicology) from the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Work of UTRGV’s Translation & Interpreting Office
This presentation will address the creation of UTRGV’s Translation & Interpreting Office within the demographic and sociocultural context of the Rio Grande Valley. It will briefly provide an overview of the work done by the Office in the first decade of its existence and then move on to focus on the current work that the Office does in terms of translation (e.g., webpages, memorandums of understanding, contracts, marketing materials, informational pamphlets, syllabi, and questionnaires for the institution) and interpreting (for both the institution and external clients).
Race, Politics, and the Press in Historical Perspective
Anti-immigrant sentiment and hate are striking features of modern U.S. society. Yet contemporary attitudes and policies are linked to, if not rooted in, a deeper historical legacy of nativist and xenophobic opposition and discrimination against the foreign born. Indeed, immigrants have repeatedly been painted as cultural, economic, political, and criminal threats. In this presentation, I consider the role of the press as an active agent in this process as well as the use of press content as a data source. Press content offers a valuable snapshot of time and place and serves as a source of public record and testimony that can capture both concrete events and public attitudes. Such data, which speak to context-specific tensions, prejudice and conflict, are crucial for clarifying and understanding fundamental sociocultural, economic, and political-legal dynamics. I conclude by discussing how anti-immigrant sentiment and hate have and continue to provoke marginalization, discrimination, and, taken to its extreme, violence targeting racial minorities and the foreign born.
Dr. Salvatore Restifo is a Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the College of Liberal Arts at UTRGV. His research reflects his ongoing interest in issues concerning social inequality and change, and he applies mixed-methods techniques to examine: 1) racial/ethnic, gender, and nativity-based inequalities, 2) anti-immigrant sentiment and hate, and 3) political partisanship, information politics, and institutional power. Dr. Restifo is co-director of the Texas Alliance for Research on Sociological Issues (TARSI) Lab—with projects investigating racial microaggressions on college campuses and attitudes on immigration in the borderlands. He regularly teaches courses on social stratification, race/ethnicity, and advanced statistics, and his research has appeared in such journals as the American Sociological Review, City & Community, Population Research & Policy Review, Social Currents, and Social Science Computer Review. Dr. Restifo earned his PhD and master’s degree in sociology from Ohio State University and bachelor’s degree in sociology and history from Arizona State University.
The History of the Registral Senses of ‘Brothers’ and ‘Sisters’
In language contact studies, various types of borrowing, especially those of lexical borrowing, have received generous amounts of attention, while sense borrowing, which is similarly vital to research in language contact and semasiological change, has clearly received less. This paper contributes to such inquiry by examining register-specific sense borrowing in the English kinship terms brother and sister. More particularly, it offers data which indicate that in Old English times, as Christianity spread throughout the community of English speakers and writers, these terms evidently acquired from the then predominant and superstrate language of the Christian faith, Latin, the religious sense of ‘fellow male/female member of the Christian Church’ and that soon afterward, predominantly in Middle English times, the terms adopted the extended sense of ‘fellow male/female member of a religious order’. Further indicated is that sister subsequently took on the related meaning of ‘woman engaged in nursing or charitable work’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, brother and sister bear these meanings down to the present day. In addition to identifying early attestations of Latin-Old English religious sense equivalence of brother (OE broþor) and sister (OE sweostor), and to tracing the sense developments of the two terms through Middle and Modern English down to Present-Day English, this investigation argues within the framework of usage-based theory that token frequency and type frequency as well as lexico-semantic association were causal to the establishment and maintenance of religious-register-specific n-form plural number marking in the twonouns. The data adduced were culled from Old English texts such as the Old English Version of the Gospels and Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, Middle English texts such as Laʒamon’s Brut and the English Gilds, and Modern English texts which broadly represent the religious register in more recent centuries as well as Present-Day English publications of a small variety of media sources. Larger context frequency statistics were obtained from the Corpus of the Dictionary of Old English, the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse),and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
Dr. Jack Newman’s academic background is in theoretical linguistics. He received his B.A. and M.S. degrees in the United States, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Warsaw in Poland. His research interests lie in English historical grammar and lexis, more specifically in Old and Middle English morphology and phonology as well as medieval and modern English semantics and borrowing. He is co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Token: A Journal of English Linguistics. Professor Newman regularly attends international conferences on English historical linguistics (e.g. ICEHL, ICOME, and SHEL), and he serves on the editorial boards of several international journals. At UTRGV, he teaches undergraduate courses in the history of the English language, English grammar, and descriptive linguistics along with graduate courses in the history of English, English phonology, and global varieties of English.
Sin ellos, no podría estudiar: Grandparents and multilingual teachers in the borderlands
This study, grounded in Bourdieu’s concept of agency, Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth, and critiques of neoliberalism, examines how bilingual pre-service teachers in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) reflect on their grandparents’ roles in bilingual education. Using student reflections (n=50), field notes, and pedagogical materials (n=42), the case study reveals how neoliberal orientations and dominant family discourses marginalize grandparents’ linguistic and cultural contributions. Despite systemic neglect, pre-service teachers recognized grandparents’ agency in preserving heritage and sustaining communication across generations. The findings highlight both the invisibility and resilience of transnational grandparents as essential contributors to community identity and bilingual education in Texas.
Dr. David Martínez-Prieto is an assistant professor at the Department of Bilingual and Literacy Studies at UTRGV. He holds a Ph.D. in Culture, Literacy, and Language. David has taught in teacher preparation programs in the United States and Mexico for 15 years. His research examines the political, socio-cultural, and economic factors that impact Mexican-origin participants in multilingual education.
Latinidad and Language in Latino Health
Recent work in Latino Health suggests that a fuller understanding of the challenges facing Latina/o/x populations requires a more nuanced approach to latinidades and language (see Lebron and Borrell, 2024). In this talk, I will explore the historical conceptualizations of latinidad and language in Latino health and discuss alternative approaches that can open up new avenues for exploration in applied linguistics and public health.
Dr. Glenn Martinez, PhD MPH is Dean of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts, Professor of Spanish, Bicultural/Bilingual Studies and Public Health, and Stumberg Distinguished University Chair at UT San Antonio. Dr. Martinez is author of Mexican Americans and Language: Del dicho al hecho (Arizona, 2006) and Spanish in Health Care: Policy, Practice and Pedagogy in Latino Health (2020), co-author of Recovering the US-Hispanic Linguistic Heritage with Alejandra Balestra and María Irene Moyna (Arte Público, 2008) and Tension and Contention in Language Education for Latinxs in the United States with Robert Train (Routledge, 2020), and co-editor of The Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare with Michou Lor, Pilar Ortega and Susana Ramírez (Wiley, 2024). His work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the US Department of Education, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Coming Soon!