Rosa Vallejos-Yopán Distinguished Scholar
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2025-26
Brazil
Rosa Vallejos-Yopán, a professor in the Department of Linguistics, has received a Distinguished Scholar Award to investigate how linguistic structure reflects humans' conceptualizations of the world around them. Questions regarding how speakers translate the details of their environment into sentences have been approached from multiple perspectives, but mainly in Western societies. But what happens when individuals speak languages that are quite different from each other? To what extent does their experience with a second language impact their conceptualizations of the world? Vallejos-Yopán will focus on bilingual speakers from Secoya villages in the Amazon, where Spanish is on the rise. Given that Secoya and Spanish are different in their grammars, her project contributes to the debate about whether attention to details is mediated by the grammatical patterns speakers have at their disposal. Her project entails fieldwork, data analysis and dissemination of results. Except for fieldwork, all other phases will be carried out at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), in Florianopolis, Brazil. Brazil is where much of the research on Amazonian languages and on language contact between indigenous and colonial languages is happening. During her time at UFSC, in addition to research presentations, she will offer two mini-courses for graduate students.
