Linguistics Program Takes The National Stage

At this year’s Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association, University of Calgary PhD student Francisco Ongay González won the prize for best student poster presentation with his work Prepositional and Prepositionless Durative Adverbials in Spanish. Below, he describes his work:

“Durative adverbials in Spanish alternate between having a preposition or not, as in Gerardo durmió (por) ocho horas ‘Gerardo slept (for) eight hours’. According to Travis (2010), direct objects move to a structural position that delimits the timespan of an event, but they can compete with accusative adverbials for that position (cf. Pereltsvaig 2000). I hypothesize that prepositionless durative adverbials are accusative adverbials. In an Acceptability Judgement Task, native speakers rated sentences containing durative adverbials in combination with different kinds of objects. The results showed a significant difference between prepositional and prepositionless adverbials, which supports the hypothesis. However, unexpected interactions with object type suggested complexities that call for further work.”

That further work, including more experimental research, will form a part of Francisco’s thesis dissertation. The testing of theoretical predictions by way of experimental research is exemplary of the work students undertake in the Linguistics Graduate Program. One of the core goals of the program is to give students the skills and training to progress from a theoretical question to empirical predictions, leading to psycholinguistic testing. This work is a prime example of that progression. 

Congratulations, Francisco!