I am a PhD candidate in Romance Languages (Linguistics) at UGA. I earned a MA degree in Language Studies from the Universidade Estadual de Londrina, in Brazil, and served as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Athens. My work centers on Spanish and Portuguese, mostly from a comparative perspective, informed by theories of language variation and change, sociolinguistics, computational and corpus linguistics.
My dissertation project explores language variation in intensifying constructions in Mexican Spanish in contrast with Brazilian Portuguese. I rely on computational methods to observe and extract meaningful patterns of intensification both from social media and corpora. In this way, I seek to contribute to the understanding of affective language in Latin America, as well as issues related to online communities of practice and the sociolinguistics of the internet language.
I also have an interest on the sociolinguistics of variable number agreement between subjects and verbs in Mosquito Coast Spanish and the pragmatic effects of personal pronominal variation in Brazilian Portuguese.
Research
Language Variation & Change
Sociolinguistics
Computational & Corpus linguistics
Applied Sociolinguistics & Language teaching
Language & technology
Digital Humanities