Carmen Jany

Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics

California State University
Department of World Languages and Literatures
San Bernardino, CA 92407-2393
cjany@csusb.edu

University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
In 2002 I started my graduate studies in linguistics at UCSB focusing on Native American languages, in particular those found in California and Mexico, linguistic typology, language contact, all aspects of grammar, and applied linguistics. For my MA, awarded in 2004, I worked on Argument structure and transitivity in Chimariko. My dissertation project involved the grammatical description of Chimariko within an areal-typological framework, based mainly on the Harrington materials. It was carried out under the guidance of professors Marianne Mithun, Sandra A. Thompson, Matthew Gordon, and Dorothy Chun. I was awarded the Lancaster Dissertation Award for best dissertation in the humanities in 2007 when I graduated.
While at USCB, I also started the documentation and description of Chuxnabán Mixe spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as the preparation of instruction materials for that language. This remains an ongoing major project of mine. Currently, I am working on a web-based trilingual (Mixe-English-Spanish) dictionary database which includes information about the phonetics and phonology of Chuxnabán Mixe.
I also completed an additional interdisciplinary PhD emphasis in Applied Linguistics, and I obtained a Certificate in College and University Teaching while at USCB.

University of Southern California, Los Angeles (USC)
A dissertation scholarship awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation allowed me to visit the University of Southern California for two semesters in 2000. There, I worked closely together with Prof. Carmen Silva-Corvalán on the impact of English on Puerto Rican Spanish, focusing on sociolinguistic issues in connection with language contact and bilingualism.

University of Zürich, Switzerland
As an undergraduate at the University of Zurich, I focused on South American and Caribbean literature, with Spanish and Italian linguistics and journalism as minors. To expand my knowledge of South American and Caribbean literature and culture, I spent two semesters at the University of Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela, and one semester at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. In 1997, I obtained a License in Romance studies and journalism. After my undergraduate studies, I started to work on my dissertation in Spanish sociolinguistics, entitled El impacto del inglés en el español puertorriqueño: un análisis comparativo, under the guidance of Prof. Georg Bossong. I was awarded a doctorate in Spanish in 2001.

Last updated: 07/12/2011