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Timothy Gupton

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Associate Professor, Dept. of Romance Languages

IMPORTANT NOTE: My home department is Romance Languages, and I teach for them primarily in Spanish. If you cannot take a course in Spanish, you will most likely not be able to take coursework with me. That said, if you are interested in having me on your doctoral or master's committee, please contact me. 

I am originally from Las Vegas, Nevada. I completed my BA in Romance Languages (Spanish & French) at UNLV in 1997 and my MA in Hispanic Linguistics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1999. I took a break from graduate studies from 2000-2005 and taught English in South Korea, working primarily at universities in Gwangju (Cheollanam-do). I returned to the US in 2005, when I started my PhD studies in Spanish Linguistics specializing in generative syntax at University of Iowa under the direction of Dr. Paula Kempchinsky. I graduated from Iowa in spring 2010 and started at UGA in fall 2010.

As a theoretical and experimental syntactician, I am interested in how language is represented in the mind, in particular, the syntax of subjects, clitics and left-peripheral elements and their interaction with information structure. I employ a variety of experimental methods based primarily on generative second language acquisition research in order to elicit quantitative psycholinguistic judgment data. My current research interests include the prosody of contrast and CLLD in Galician and Spanish, the L2 acquisition of word order variation in Spanish, and subject positions and information structure in Dominican Spanish. To see more about my research, visit my Romance Languages homepage.

I am a native speaker of English, and an Ln speaker of Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician (acquired to varying degrees in that order). I also have knowledge of Korean, Latin, and German.

 

Education:

2010 - PhD in Spanish, University of Iowa

1999 - MA in Hispanic Linguistics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

1997 - BA in Romance Languages, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Specific Research Areas:

Syntax, Second language acquisition, Romance languages

Grants:

2018 - Fulbright US Scholar Award (Dominican Republic)

2019 - National Science Foundation Conference Grant (LSRL 49)

2019 - UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts Public Impact Grant

Selected Publications:

Books

1.  Gupton, T. 2014. The syntax-information structure interface: clausal word order and the left periphery in Galician. Berlin/Boston: DeGruyter/Mouton.

Recent peer-reviewed journal articles 

1. Hodges, L., Knouse, S., and Gupton, T. (2023). La lingüística y sus beneficios para la enseñanza del españolHispanic Studies Review 7(2), 1-22.

2. Gupton, T. (2023). El foco, la estructura informativa y el ser focalizador en el español cibaeñoRevista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 41, 143-166.

3. Levishna, N., Namboodiripad, S., Allassonnière-Tang, M., Kramer, M., Talamo, L., Verkerk, A., Wilmoth, S., Garrido Rodriguez, G., Gupton, T., Kidd, E., Liu, Z., Naccarato, C., Nordlinger, R., Panova, A., and Stoynova, N. (2023). Why we need a gradient approach to word orderLinguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences 61(4), 825-883.

4. Gupton, T., and Sánchez-Calderón, S. (2023). Focus at the syntax-discourse interface in Spanish: Optionality and unaccusativity reconsideredSecond Language Research 39(1), 185-229.

5. Gravely, B., and Gupton, T. (2022). Nanoparameters in Western Iberian Romance: Null copulas in Galician and AsturianIsogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics 8(1)/16, 1-31.

Peer-reviewed book chapters

1. Gupton, T. (2021). Aligning syntax and prosody in Galician, in Gupton, T., & Gielau, E., (eds), 41-67. East and West of the Pentacrest: Linguistic studies in honor of Paula Kempchinsky. John Benjamins.

2. Leal, T., and Gupton, T. (2021). Acceptability experiments in Romance Languages. In Grant Goodall (ed.), 448-476. The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Syntax. Cambridge University Press. 

3. Gupton, T. 2018. "Syntax and Its Interfaces". In Geeslin, Kim (ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics, 392-414. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

4. Gupton, T. 2017. “Early minority language acquirers of Spanish exhibit focus-related interface asymmetries: Word order alternation and optionality in Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-Galician, and Spanish-English bilinguals”. In Lauchlan, Fraser and María Carmen Parafita-Couto (eds.). Bilingualism and Minority Languages in Europe, 214-241. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

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