Maria Irene Moyna

Texas A&M University | TAMU · Department of Hispanic Studies

This study reports on a project that collected and documented narrative reflections of first‐generation Latinx students at a large Research 1 public university in the US southwest. The team (2 faculty members and 4 undergraduates) interviewed 23 students (20 undergraduate and 3 graduate) on topics including family, community, sense of belonging in...

Aims and objectives This study focuses on Nick Villarreal (1951–2017), a bilingual and bicultural conjunto musician from San Antonio. It ascertains the frequency, formal features, and socio-pragmatic functions of the Spanish/English code-switching found in his songs. Methodology Quantitative and qualitative approaches are utilized to explore Nick...

This volume connects the latest research on language acquisition across the lifespan with the explanation of language change in specific sociohistorical settings. This conversation benefits from recent advances in two areas: on the one hand, the study of how learners of various ages and in various sociolinguistic contexts acquire language variation...

This paper analyzes the effects of child language acquisition as a critical factor in a morphological change, namely, the replacement of the etymologically singular second person paradigm ( tuteo ) by its plural counterpart ( voseo ) in 19th century Río de la Plata Spanish. The account applies a sociohistorical model which proposes that young child...

This paper explores the operation of child language acquisition as a critical factor in some forms of language change. It proposes a sociohistorical model that incorporates the potential for young children to function as linguistic agents in certain environments, characterized by unpredictable variation in the input, lack of normative mechanisms, a...

This study analyses variation and change in Uruguayan Spanish address between formal ( usted ) and informal variants ( tú, vos ). It focusses on address representations in children’s literature written between 1918 and 1973 – foundational texts that helped consolidate national identity. Our study answers the following questions: (a) What were the m...

This special Languages issue focuses on sociolinguistic analyses of language as used in recorded songs. The goal of this volume is to further our knowledge and deepen our understanding of the role of language features in artists’ building of identities in performance. We welcome quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic analyses of the productio...

This study analyzes representations of bilingualism in the songs of Tucson native Eduardo ‘Lalo’ Guerrero (1916-2005), whose artistic career spanned more than six decades, merged Anglo and Latinx musical styles, and straddled the US-Mexico border (E. Guerrero and Meece Mentes 2002). Using the largest available repertoire (n = 463), we classified so...

This study analyzes representations of bilingualism in the songs of Tucson native Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero (1916–2005), whose artistic career spanned more than six decades, merged Anglo and Latinx musical styles, and straddled the US-Mexico border. Using the largest available repertoire (n = 463), we classified songs and analyzed language mixing qua...

This case study focuses on an interdisciplinary educational experience in which university Pharmacy and Humanities early and late Spanish-English bilinguals were paired to translate questions related to sociobehavioral aspects of medication use. This work describes the personal and professional benefits reported by the translators and the prevailin...

This study focuses on the address paradigm in the Spanish spoken in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a Latin American variety which presents speakers with three options—one polite (usted), and two familiar (pan-Hispanic tú and regional vos). Recent quantitative studies have shown that the range of polite usted is shrinking in the dialect, as you...

This chapter first reviews the evolution and geographic distribution of the address systems of Spanish, and considers their use in context, focusing on several aspects where they intersect with pragmatics. It shows that the microsocial dimensions of power and solidarity account for basic distribution of deferential and non-deferential address, but...

Musical code-switching has been identified in US youth styles such as bachata (Flores Ohlson, 2011; Ohlson, 2007), and rap (Hernández, 2012; Loureiro-Rodríguez, 2017). A growing body of literature considers the lyrical production of the US-Mexico borderlands (Moyna & Loureiro-Rodríguez, 2018, on Lalo Guerrero; Loureiro-Rodríguez et al., 2018, on th...

Data from a survey on address usage analyzed using R and Rbrul.

This study analyzes Spanish-English code-switching in the music of the Texas Tornados, a bilingual-bicultural San Antonio band. Their entire repertoire was transcribed and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to ascertain the form and functions of code-switching. We found that 39% of songs included language mixing, with English being the most...

This pilot study analyzes attitudes towards informal address in the Spanish of Montevideo, Uruguay, through the matched guise technique (MGT). Female raters (106) were presented with the three informal address options possible in the dialect (tuteo: tú tienes ‘you have’; voseo: vos tenés ‘you have’; and the TV hybrid: tú tenés ‘you have’), which ha...

Conference presentation

Qualitative study of usted in contemporary Montevideo Spanish, based on attitude interviews carried out in 2012.

Analysis of the types and functions of code-mixing in the lyrics of the Texas Tornados

Powerpoint presentation for paper co-authored by Teresa Butt and Irene Moyna

Matched-guise test exploring attitudes towards tuteo, voseo, and hybrid T-V forms

In this study, we analyze the representations of singular address (voseo, tuteo, and ustedeo) in contemporary Uruguayan children’s literature from 1997 to 2011 as part of a broader analysis of variation and change in Uruguayan Spanish (Behares 1981; Bertolotti 2011; Bertolotti and Coll 2003; Elizaincín and Díaz 1981; Mendoza 2005; Moyna 2009, 2015:...

This study investigates language attitudes towards English, Spanish and code-switching in two Texas border cities (Laredo and Edinburg) by means of a matched guise test with three attribute dimensions (solidarity, status, and personal appeal). It was found that there were no significant overall differences between attitudes in the two cities. As an...

This study analyzes variation and change in address forms (tú, vos) in Uruguayan Spanish by focusing on popular songs. It addresses the following: (a) to what extent Uruguayan popular music from the last fifty years reflects local usage, and (b) whether these representations have changed over time. Eight hundred song lyrics by ten Uruguayan artists...

This work describes compounds in Old and Modern Spanish, and accounts for them using a syntactic approach. Chapter 1 reviews properties and tests of compounding. Chapter 2 presents a syntactic account of compounding, grounded on the notion that the internal structures of words and phrases are identical. Two possible compounds are identified. In one...

In this presidential address, I first focus narrowly on quantitative research on the semantic interpretation of noun-noun Spanish compound words in early and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Later, I reexamine this case study to show that even theoretical linguistic research reflects its circumstances, is responsive to its immediate community, and...

This is the first book devoted entirely to the history of compound words in Spanish. Based on data obtained from Spanish dictionaries and databases of the past thousand years, it documents the evolution of the major compounding patterns of the language. It analyzes the structural, semantic, and orthographic features of each compound type, and also...

This study evaluates 39 different phonetic inventories of 16 Spanish-speaking children (ages 0;11 to 5;1) in terms of hierarchical complexity. Phonetic featural differences are considered in order to evaluate the proposed implicational hierarchy of Dinnsen et al.'s phonetic inventory typology for English. The children's phonetic inventories are exa...

This paper analyzes language maintenance/shift in rural southern California during the second half of the 19th century. It is based on a dataset of personal letters exchanged by the bilingual/bicultural family living in a rancho with each other and with the surrounding population. The letters were classified by author in three groups: (1) from fami...

This article analyzes the portrayals of Spanish in The Squatter and the Don (1885), a novel written in English by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, a Baja Californian who immigrated to Alta California at the time of its annexation to the USA in 1848 and became the first Hispanic American woman writer. Her novel had an ideological purpose, namely, to den...

El presente estudio es un análisis cuantitativo de las representaciones teatrales del tratamiento de segunda persona del singular en el español del Río de la Plata a comienzos del siglo XX. Se basa en dieciocho obras de teatro escritas entre 1886 y 1911, en cada una de las cuales se contabilizaron todos los verbos de segunda persona (tuteantes y vo...

This is a qualitative analysis of the historical dimensions of Spanish-English and Spanish-Portuguese contact in the Americas, based on 19th century documents from southern California and northern Uruguay. Language mixing is found in both areas, but whereas in California it is limited to the earliest periods and to informal registers, in Uruguay it...

th century, based on seventy-two unpublished documents. It aims to provide a panoramic and comprehensive description of this borderland variety of Spanish by considering its linguistic characteristics and its social context, in particular, its sustained contact with English. In order to do so, documents were chosen from before and after the annexat...

This paper proposes a unified account of headship assignment in Spanish endocentric compounds with a nominal non-head. It is argued that these compounds follow the universal head-complement word order (Kayne 1994), with the non-head element occupying the rightmost position. This structure surfaces whenever the non-head nominals in the compound are...

Typescript. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Florida, 1996. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-109).