We are delighted to announce that Meritxell Feliu Ribas, Lab Manager and fourth year graduate student, has been awarded the competitive Louis Bevier Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the School of Graduate Studies.
Meritxell’s project, Grammatical Variation and Innovation in Spanish: How Early Spanish-English Bilinguals Talk About the Future, examines how early Spanish-English bilinguals express futurity and present probability in Spanish, arguing that bilingual speakers are not simplifying or incompletely acquiring Spanish, but are instead systematically restructuring and innovating within their bilingual grammatical systems. Using a mixed-methods variationist sociolinguistic approach that combines naturalistic corpus analysis, experimental tasks, and Bayesian statistical modeling, the project investigates how bilinguals choose among competing future forms (e.g., cantaré ‘I will sing’, voy a cantar ‘I am going to sing’, canto ‘I [will] sing’) and how these choices are shaped by linguistic and social factors.
Drawing on data from sociolinguistic corpora and experimental studies in both Spanish and English, the dissertation demonstrates that bilinguals exhibit rule-governed patterns of grammatical variation and semantic change, including novel uses of the morphological future for epistemic hedging and present probability. These findings challenge deficit-based models of bilingualism and contribute to theories of language contact, language change, bilingual acquisition, and sociolinguistic variation, while also highlighting the broader educational and social implications of recognizing bilingual speech as complex, systematic, and innovative rather than deficient.
While Meritxell’s project is in advanced stages of completion, this fellowship year will allow her to bring her dissertation to its full intellectual potential, dedicating additional time to determining wwhether the observed reconfiguration of bilingual grammars stems from contact with English,internal evolution of Spanish, or both. This synthesis will highlight the wider implications of her dissertation and transform it from a set of related studies into a field-shaping contribution to our understanding of language contact, linguistic change, and the social and linguistic dimensions of bilingualism in the U.S.
Felicitats! ¡Felicidades! Congratulations, Meritxell!