Alicia Alexandra Assini
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
PhD Student
University of Texas at Austin
Alicia Alexandra Assini received a Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar award in Spring 2018 to support research on “Speaking New Mexico: The Intersection of Spoken and Computer-Mediated Language.” At the time of the award, she was a doctoral student and assistant instructor in the Iberian and Latin Americna Linguistics Program The University of Texas at Austin.
Assini's research interests include language variation and change, sociolinguistics, corpus/computational linguistics, multilingualism, and code-switching. Access to the multi-faceted data and information in the NMCOSS 1996-2006 collection is fundamental to the completion of her dissertation research plans.
Title of Research : Speaking New Mexico: The Intersection of Spoken and Computer-Mediated Language
While at UNM, her research will focus on New Mexico Spanish and includes building a corpus of New Mexico Tweets, and currently has collected over half a million. The New Mexico Twitter corpus (NMTC) will be used in conjunction with the data in the NMCOSS linguistic records of the 1909-2006 collection to analyze how New Mexicans utilize Spanish in both the spoken and social media digital spheres. Of particular interest is the dialectal diversity within the state and the semantics of New Mexico regional words, which she will research by comparing and contrasting the language of New Mexico Spanish as seen in NMTC and NMCOSS, to determine if regional dialectal differences, found primarily in lexical variation, can be identified by using computational approaches.
