The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is proud to announce two award-winning efforts last weekend from its graduate students.  Jennifer Barajas, as well as a collaborative effort from Devin Grammon and Meghan Dabkowski, each took a second place ribbon at the Hayes Graduate Research Forum at The Ohio State University. The Hayes Forum showcases the work of roughly 140 graduate students from the university.  This year, faculty judges accepted 150 items from over 350 abstracts submitted.

With her oral presentation, “A Sociophonetic Approach to Vowel Raising: Social Networks in Rural Michoacán, México”, Barajas took second prize by highlighting how variations in pronunciation correspond to different social networks. Particularly, her presentation focused on how different social factors are related to the pronunciation of unstressed vowels. When asked for an English equivalent, Barajas joked, “Milk vs. Melk?”, but went on to stress that it was more in depth than that. Her research spanned three years, and sent her to Michoacán in 2011 to collect data. “(The Hayes Forum) was a fun experience and a great opportunity that all graduate students should take advantage of”.

Grammon and Dabkowski’s collaboration on the poster, “When Grammar Meets Politics: Uses of stigmatized language on a political talk show”, also took second place, and garnered much attention from peers at the conference. They looked at how stigmatized language forms are distributed across interactions and speakers by analyzing episodes and transcripts from a political talk show by the late Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez. Their research suggests that grammar itself is political and that language is non-neutral. Dabkowski commented,”(Hayes) was great practice in making research accessible to non-specialists”. Grammon added, “It was a really positive experience, and it was cool to see other research outside of the Department (Spanish and Portuguese).  

The Hayes Graduate Student Forum again proved to be a great success for the University. A pair of second place awards last weekend, along with Meagan Horn’s third place award in 2013, also showed the extended quality of research within the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. This year’s participants emphatically agree that graduate students in the future should take full opportunity of this platform to showcase their hard and meaningful work.