During my 50-year research career, I conducted field research in many places, sometimes expanding on the work of earlier researchers, and in other instances bringing to light unique linguistic configurations for the first time. Even in such cases, I did not “discover” these varieties (any more than Columbus “discovered” America), but on more than one occasion, I have had the amazingly good fortune to break the news of my findings to a wider audience than the speech communities themselves. I have also adapted a number of laboratory-based techniques to rather challenging field environments, fine-tuning and even innovating in the process. As I have presented my research in a variety of venues and circumstances, I am frequently asked about the “how” and “why” of my ventures. My published research largely focuses on the “what,”, “when”, and “who,” leaving in abeyance the more anecdotal issues, which would probably have been rejected as irrelevant and gratuitous by reviewers.
The following vignettes are non-peer-reviewed snippets and recollections that provide a bit of a back story to some of my more propitious research projects. Although a retrospective of my career may give the impression that I have always landed on my feet, if this was ever the case, it was only after having tripped and fallen many times along the way. It is my hope that these accounts of my meanderings and stumblings offer a bit of comic relief to more serious-minded scholars, and encourage beginning researchers to be more systematic and organized than I ever was.
Click on the links below to find the stories behind some of my research ventures.
Brazilian border communities (Portuguese-Spanish)
Chabacano (Philippine creole Spanish)
Chota (Afro-Ecuadoran) Spanish
Misiones (Argentina) Portuguese
Palenquero (Afro-Colombian creole)
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