Professor Catherine Travis
Areas of expertise
- Linguistics 2004
- Language In Culture And Society (Sociolinguistics) 200405
- Language In Time And Space (Incl. Historical Linguistics, Dialectology) 200406
- Linguistic Structures (Incl. Grammar, Phonology, Lexicon, Semantics) 200408
- Iberian Languages 200308
Research interests
Catherine’s research interests lie in questions related to the ways in which linguistic and social factors impact on language variation and change. She works within the variationist framework, and addresses these questions through the study of the spontaneous spoken language of members of well-defined speech communities. Her primary current research projects include the 'Sydney Speaks' project, examining variation and change in English spoken in Sydney, by diverse communities including migrant communities (as part of the ARC funded Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language; http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/sydney-speaks/), and the New Mexico Spanish-English codeswitching project, examining the Spanish of a bilingual community in New Mexico, USA (deriving from a project funded by the NSF; https://nmcode-switching.la.psu.edu/nmseb).
Biography
Catherine Travis is Professor of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU, and a Chief Investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. She holds a Bachelor of Asian Studies with First Class Honors in Linguistics and Japanese from the ANU, and a PhD in Linguistics and Spanish from La Trobe University (2002). She came to the ANU in 2012 from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA, where she worked for 10 years. She is a NAATI certified translator, Spanish-English.
Researcher's projects
Current Grants
2014-2021: ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language ($AUD28 million). http://dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/
Project: 'Sydney Speaks' - http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/sydney-speaks/
Past Grants
2019: "Accented Australian English for Acoustic Modelling", Defence Science and Technology Group ($AUD65,000)
2014-2016: "A national language studies portal for Australian universities", Office of Learning and Teaching ($AUD300,000). www.ulpa.edu.au
2010-2013: "Evaluating convergence via code-switching: Cross-linguistic priming, rates and the structure of subject expression" (http://nmcode-switching.la.psu.edu) (National Science Foundation BCS 1019112/1019122 [2010-2013]) Co-Investigator: Rena Torres Cacoullos (The Pennsylvania State University) ($US270,000)
Available student projects
I am interested in supervising work in areas related to the study of variation and change. I particularly welcome students who wish to join the Sydney Speaks project, but I am also available for supervison in areas related to Australian English more broadly, Australian community languages, language contact, and Hispanic Linguistics.
Current student projects
PhD theses, as Chair of Panel
Gan Qiao. Language Use and Ethnic Identity: Evidence from Australian English by Second Generation Migrants from China. (2019- )
Elena Sheard. Language and social change over the lifespan: Speakers of Australian English forty years on (2019- )
Past student projects
(As primary supervisor)
ANU MA theses
Inas Ghina. 2019. (t) Glottalization in Acehnese Language Varieties.
Li Nguyen. 2016. Incorporated kin terms, bilingual speakers: A corpus-based study of Vietnamese kin terms as personal reference in bilingual speech.
Sze Tsui. 2020. Variation and change in the usage of written Cantonese in Hong Kong.
Shuyu Zhang. 2015. Who am I when I say I speak Chinese? Ethnic Orientation and Heritage Language in Second-Generation Chinese Australians. Austrlaian National University.
ANU Honours theses
Kiya Alimoradian. 2012. “Makes me feel more Aussie”: Ethnic identity and the use of mate by Australians from a non-English speaking background.
Esther Lee. 2020. Quotatives in Australian English: Ethnicity and change over time.
Bonnie Mclean. 2019. Ideophones in space and time: a look at Japonic.
Jennifer Plaistowe. 2015. Coordinated code-switching: A study of interactive alignment in bilingual conversation.
Amy Sanson. 2020. Automated topic segmentation of Sydney Speaks dialogues for enhanced linguistic analysis. (Computer Science)
ANU PhD theses
Matthew Callaghan. 2020. Who are you?” in Chile: gauging variation and change in language and society.
Fariba Shirali. 2020. Disagreement in Persian academic discussions. (supervision 2019-2020)
Previous PhD theses
Sonia Balasch. 2011. Estudio sociolingüístico de la marca diferencial de objeto directo (DOM) en dos variedades del español contemporáneo (‘A sociolinguistic study of Differential Object Marking in two contemporary varieites of Spanish'). University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Current position: Adjunct Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, the University of Montana, Missoula.
Manuel Burgos. 2013. El conflicto armado a través de El Tiempo: Análisis discursivo de los reportes de guerra en la prensa colombiana (1998-2008) (‘The armed conflict through El Tiempo: A discourse analysis of war reports in the Colombian Press’). Department of Spanish & Portuguese. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Current position: Lecturer, Department of Spanish and Portuguese. New York University
Jenny Dumont. 2011. Full NPs in conversations and narratives: The effects of genre on information flow and interaction. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.
Current position: Assistant professor, Department of Spanish, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania.
Mami McCraw. 2010. First-person singular pronouns and ellipsis in Japanese. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Daniel Sanford. 2010. Frequency and figuration: A usage-based approach to metaphor. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Current position: Senior Program Manager, Centre for Academic Program Support, University of New Mexico.
Agripino Silveira. 2011. Frequency effects and specialization of forms in pronominal expression in Brazilian Portuguese. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.
Current position: Lecturer, Language Center. Stanford University, California.
Damian Vergara Wilson. 2009. From ‘remaining’ to ‘becoming’: A diachronic usage-based approach to the expression of ‘becoming’: quedar(se) + adjective. University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of New Mexico.
Publications
- Hualde, José Ignacio, Olarrea, Antxon, Escobar, Anna, Travis, Catherine E., Sanz, Cristina. 2020, Introducción a la Lingüística Hispánica (3rd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Travis, Catherine E. To appear. Alternating or mixing languages. In Danae Pérez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek and Daniel Schreier (eds), English and Spanish in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Travis, Catherine E. To Appear. Gramáticas en contacto en un corpus bilingüe. Verba
- Purser, Benjamin, Grama, James and Travis, Catherine E. 2020. Australian English over time: Using sociolinguistic analysis to inform dialect coaching. Voice and Speech Review. 14(3): 269-291. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268263.2020.1750791
- Barth, Danielle, Grama, James, Gonzalez, Simon & Travis, Catherine E. 2020. Using forced alignment for sociophonetic research on a minority language. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (Selected Papers from NWAV 47) 25(2): Article 2, Available at https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol25/iss2/2/
- Gonzalez, Simon, Grama, James and Travis, Catherine E. 2020. Comparing the performance of forced aligners used in sociophonetic research. Linguistics Vanguard 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0058
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2019, Variationist typology: Shared probabilistic constraints across (non-)null subject languages, Linguistics, 57(3):653-692.
- Grama, James, Travis, Catherine E. & Gonzalez, Simon, S 2019, 'Initiation, Progression, and Conditioning of the Short-Front Vowel Shift in Australia', 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, ed. Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain and Paul Warren, Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., Australia, pp. 1769-1773.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2018. Discovering structure: Person and accessibility', in Naomi L. Shin and Deniel Erker (ed.), Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy, John Benjamins Publishing Company, United States, pp. 67-90.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2018, Bilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact, Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press.
- Gonzalez Ochoa, S., Travis, C. E., Grama, J., Barth, D. & Ananthanarayan, S. 2018, 'Recursive forced alignment: A test on a minority language', 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, ed. Julien Epps, Joe Wolfe, John Smith and Caroline Jones, The Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, Inc., Australia, pp. 145-148.
- Travis, Catherine E., Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Kidd, Evan 2017, 'Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech', Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 20(2): 283-298.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Lindstrom, Amy M. 2016. Different registers, different grammars? Subject expression in English conversation and narrative. Language Variation and Change 28(1): 103-128.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2016, Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19:733-753.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2015. Beyond questionnaires: Community-based measures of bilingualism. Southwest Journal of Linguistics. 34(1-2): 105-127.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Torres Cacoullos, Rena (Eds). 2015. 'Gauging convergence on the ground: code-switching in the community'. International Journal of Bilingualism (Special Issue). 19(4): 365-480.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Travis, Catherine E. 2015. 'Gauging convergence on the ground: Code-switching in the community'. International Journal of Bilingualism. 19(4): 365-386.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2015, 'Foundations for the Study of Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish in Contact with English: Assessing Interlinguistic (Dis)similarity via Intralinguistic Variability', in Ana M Carvalho, Rafael Orozco and Naomi Lapidus Shin (ed.), Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective, Georgetown University Press, United States, pp. 81-100.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2014, 'Stress on I: Debunking unitary contrast accounts', Studies in Language, 38 (2): 360-392.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2014. 'Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation', Journal of Pragmatics 63: 19-34.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Timothy Jowan Curnow. 2014, El 'es' enfático del español colombiano. Lenguas en contacto y bilingüismo 5. http://www.lenguasdecolombia.gov.co/revista/ (Translation by Diego Arias Cortés of Travis & Curnow (2004), ‘The emphatic es construction of Colombian Spanish’.)
- Travis, Catherine E.; Hajek, John; Nettelbeck, Colin; Beckmann, Elizabeth; and Woods, Anya (eds). 2014. Practices and Policies: Current research in languages and cultures education. LCNAU. Australia.
- Travis, Catherine E.; Hajek, John; Nettelbeck, Colin; and Woods, Anya. 2014, 'Introduction to "Practices and Policies"', Languages & Cultures Network for Australian Universities Colloquium (LCNAU 2013), ed. C Travis, J Hajek, C Nettelbeck, E Beckmann and A Lloyd-Smith, LCNAU, Australia, pp. 1-5.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena 2013, 'Making Voices Count: Corpus Compilation in Bilingual Communities', Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(2): 170-194.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2013. A portrait of Spanish speakers in Australia. September Festival Magazine, 3(3): 53-55.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2012. El español en los Estados Unidos: una mezcla lingüística (Spanish in the US: a linguistic melting pot), September Festival Magazine, 2(2): 31-33.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Curnow, Timothy Jowan. 2012. Locational adverbs in Colombian Spanish conversation. In Richard File-Muriel and Rafael Orozco (eds), Linguistic Studies in Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 67-88. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. Discourse syntax. In José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea and Erin O'Rourke (eds), Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, 653-672. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics. 23 (4), 711-748.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Catherine E. Travis. 2011. Using structural variability to evaluate convergence via code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism 15(3): 241-267.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Villa, Daniel J. 2011. Language policy and language contact in New Mexico: The case of Spanish. In Catrin Norrby and John Hajek (eds), Uniformity and diversity in language policy: Global perspectives, 126-140. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
- Hualde, José Igancio, Olarrea, Antxon, Escobar, Anna Maria, Travis, Catherine E. 2010. Introducción a la Lingüística Hispánica (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, New York.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Catherine E. Travis. 2010. Variable yo expression in New Mexico: English influence? In Susana Rivera-Mills and Daniel J. Villa (eds), Spanish of the U.S. Southwest: A language in transition, 185-206. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Silveira, Agripino 2009, 'The Role of Frequency in First-Person Plural Variation in Brazilian Portuguese: Nós vs. a gente', Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 347-376.
- Curnow, Timothy Jowan and Catherine E. Travis. 2008. Locational adverbs in non-spatial settings: The case of ahí in Colombian Spanish conversation. In Timothy Jowan Curnow (ed), Selected papers from the 2007 conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2007, 'Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation', Language Variation and Change, vol. 19, pp. 101-135.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006, 'Subjetivización de construcciones: los verbos 'cognitivos' en el español conversacional', Octavo Encuentro Internacional de Linguistica en el Noroeste, ed. Rosa Maria Ortiz Ciscomani, Universidad de Sonora, Sonora, Mexico, pp. 85-109.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006, 'Dizque: A Colombian evidentiality strategy', Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 1269-1297.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006, 'The communicative realisation of confianza and calor humano in Colombian Spanish', in Cliff Goddard (ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 199-229.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to discourse markers. In Kirsten Fischer (ed), Approaches to discourse particles, 219-241. Oxford: Elsevier.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess and Edward J. Rubin (eds), Theoretical and experimental approaches to Romance linguistics: Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, 2004, 329-349. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2005, Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, Germany.
- Travis, C 2004, 'The ethnopragmatics of the diminutive in conversational Colombian Spanish', Intercultural Pragmatics, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 249-274.
- Curnow, Timothy Jowan and Catherine E. Travis. 2004. The emphatic es construction of Colombian Spanish. In Christo Moskovsky (ed), Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, http://www.als.asn.au.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2003. The semantics of the Spanish subjunctive: Its use in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Cognitive Linguistics 14(1): 47-69.
Projects and Grants
Grants information is drawn from ARIES. To add or update Projects or Grants information please contact your College Research Office.
- Accented Australian English for Acoustic Modelling (Primary Investigator)
- ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (Secondary Investigator)
- A national language studies portal for Australian universities (Secondary Investigator)