Catherine Travis

Associate Professor of Spanish & Linguistics

Humanities Bldg., room 564
(505) 277-7416
E-mail: cetravis@unm.edu

Research areas:

• Functional syntax
• Discourse analysis
• Semantics
• Hispanic linguistics

Catherine Travis’s research focuses on spontaneous spoken language from a syntactic and a semantic perspective. She is interested in studying the ways in which the spoken language adapts to meet the needs of face-to-face communication, and, far from being inferior to the written language, sees it as a rich source of evidence of the creativity and adaptability of speakers. Her book Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy appeared in May 2005. This work presents an analysis of a set of discourse markers as used in conversation, following the discourse approach developed at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, developed by Wierzbicka and colleagues. She is currently working on a project involving subject expression in New Mexican and Colombian Spanish, and is investigating the priming or perseveration of subject expression in discourse.