NEWS

Philip Limerick

Graduate Student Excellence-in-Research Award 2019

Philip Limerick completed his Ph.D. in Romance languages with a concentration in Hispanic linguistics and is now adjunct instructor of Spanish at Eastern Kentucky University. His doctoral research addressed the emergence of new varieties of Spanish among immigrant populations in the Southeastern United States, an area whose representation in the linguistics literature is small compared to the major Spanish-speaking populations in other U.S. regions. Limerick gained access to a community of speakers in Roswell, Georgia, undertaking two dozen interviews that provided the natural speech data used for his work. This research provides a framework for understanding the mechanisms that underlie linguistic variation in this community. His work is innovative, both in its treatment of this community of U.S. Latinos and in its blend of sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspectives. It could represent an important contribution to the still nascent understanding of the linguistic features that characterize new dialect formation.