My doctoral thesis started by defending and justifying some methodological premises:

1)         The way a “historical language” (Coseriu 1982) works, i.e. the way a language is organized in qualitatively different (geographical, social, stylistic, etc.) varieties, can only be analyzed within one particular stage of the evolution of this language at a time. In other words, however useful the perspective of linguistic change may be, synchrony and diachrony are to be seen as different theoretical constructs, in order to understand why linguistic elements (words, structures...) look the way they do in a specific moment of their evolution (Oesterreicher 1978, 2011);

2)         One of the most important periods in the history of Latin American Spanish was the second half of the 17th century: the initial “koineization” phase had been completed and the regional diversification of Spanish in the New World had begun (depending, among other reasons, on the degree of isolation or contact of each region with others and with the mother country: Fontanella 1992; Granda 1994);

3)         The structural component of a language consists of a group of structures related to each other, which advocates a reduction of ad-hoc explanations and the search of more general principles; consequently, linguists try to identify the group of linguistic structures that are depending on each other and forming clusters (a specific phenomenon can often be seen as a consequence of others, i.e. it constitutes an ‘epiphenomenon’);

4)         However, the search of the epiphenomenological nature of language points to general tendencies and does not (try to) avoid the study of language variation. Indeed, a linguistic phenomenon can be realized in more than one way, i.e. there is variation affecting syntactic structures that must be explained in relation to both structural and social factors. In a multivariate analysis like the one undertaken here (by means of the statistical software GOLDVARB X), all these factors can be translated into ‘explicative variables’ that account for the realization of the different variants of the ‘dependent’ variable (the target of the analysis).

Consequently, my dissertation focused on the realization of a syntactic variable, the “expression/omission of subject personal pronouns”, in a corpus of Latin American texts (more precisely, Colombian and Dominican texts), written during the second half of the 17th century and the first decades of the 18th century. Besides structural factors, special attention was paid to pragmatic and discursive variables. The interest of this linguistic phenomenon for Hispanic (and Romance) Linguistics is due to the fact that some vernacular varieties of today’s Caribbean Spanish, unlike European Spanish and another Latin American varieties (but in a relatively similar fashion to Brazilian Portuguese and French), use the subject personal pronoun at a much higher rate.

In the last part of my work, I show that the increasing usage of subject pronouns at the turn of the 18th century correlates with the increasing use of other structures, which, together with the subject expression, constitute a cluster of syntactic properties typical in non(-consitent)-pro-drop languages.  

Caribbean Spanish (diachrony)

Angolan Portuguese (synchrony)

Palenquero Creole, Colombia (both diachrony and synchrony)

Tugu Creole, Indonesia (current remnants and revitalization efforts)

Dismantlement of indexicality in international Spanish and international Portuguese

Postcolonial French, Portuguese and Spanish in Bantu-speaking areas (Angola, Equatorial Guinea, DR Congo) Linguistic Typology  

 Monographs/Editorships

In preparation

•          Contact varieties of Spanish and Spanish-lexified contact varieties. Mouton De Gruyter, Series HSK (with J. Steffen, H.J. Döhla, L. Cerno and R. Hesselbach, eds.). [contract already signed]

•          ROMANIA BANTU. Restructuring with and without transfer in two Ibero-Romance/Kikongo varieties: Cabindan Portuguese and Palenquero Creole. Mouton De Gruyter, Series Language Contact and Bilingualism [=Habilitationsschrift] [preliminary agreement with the series’ chief editor, Yaron Matras]

2015

•          Oraciones hendidas en el mundo hispanico. Problemas estructurales y variacionales. Special Issue in Revista Internacional de Lingü^stica Iberoamerica 13/2 (with Elena Diez del Corral Areta, eds.)

2013

•          Pronombres personales sujeto en espanol del Caribe. Variacion e historia. Valladolid: University of Valladolid [=PhD Thesis] [Open Access on http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/2517]

2010

•          Ars longa. Diez anos de AJIHLE. Buenos Aires: Voces del Sur (with M. T. Encinas Manterola et al., eds.)

Papers

2023/ in press (accepted for publication)

•          Gutierrez Mate, Miguel (in press): «Indefinite pronouns with THING and PERSON in two Ibero-Romance/Bantu vernaculars: Palenquero Creole and Cabinda-Portuguese». Malte Rosemeyer & Olga Kellert (ed.), Romance Indefinites. Language Science Press.

•          Gutierrez Mate, Miguel / Diez del Corral Areta, Elena (in press): «Spanish in America: (III) From Independence to the Present-Day. Andean and Caribbean varieties». Steven Dworkin, Gloria Clavena Nadal & Älvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huertas (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Historical Linguistics. Routledge

•          Gutierrez Mate, Miguel (in press): «Dos contextos estructurales en el proceso de gramaticalizacion de los pronombres sujeto en la historia del espanol del Caribe». Carlos Garatea & Älvaro Ezcurra (eds.), Espanol de America: historia y contactos. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.

•          Gutierrez Mate, Miguel / Uhl, Patricia (in press): «No quiero batirme con vos... ni renir contigo. Enfoques textuales hol^sticos para el estudio de las formas de tratamiento». Revista Espanola de Lingü^stica Aplicada

•          Gutierrez Mate, Miguel (in press): «A negagäo (banto-)ibero-romänica do tipo näo...näo. Um olhar sob a perspectiva do portugues de Cabinda, Angola». Perspectives en linguistique et philologie romanes (I et II). Dolores Corbella, Josefa Dorta, Rafael Padron (eds.). Paris, ^ditions de Linguistique et de Philologie, Biblioteque de Dinguistique Romane (BiLiRo), n° 18.1-18.2.

2022

•          Steffen, Joachim / Gutierrez Mate, Miguel (2022): «The significance of language contact in the restructuring of Brazilian Portuguese: historical evidence from Southern Brazilian bilingual communities of German origin». Benjamin Meisnitzer & Anja Henneman (eds.), Linguistic Hybridity. Contact-induced and cognitively motivated grammaticalization and lexicalization processes in Romance Languages. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag. 183-199.

2021

•          Dankel, Philipp / Gutierrez Mate, Miguel (2021): «El uso de vuestro en el espanol de Cuzco: nuevos datos y nuevas perspectivas de estudio». Lexis 45(1), 1-76.

< https://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/index.php/lexis/article/view/23860/22716 >

• Gutierrez Mate, Miguel / Steffen, Joachim (2021): «Construcciones existenciales en el continuo afroiberorromanico: propuesta de tipolog^a y modelacion del influjo del sustrato». Journal of Ibero-Romance Creoles 11. 1-108

< http://www.acblpe.com/revista/volume-11-2021 >

•          Cerno, Leonardo / Gutierrez Mate, Miguel / Steffen, Joachim (2021): «Tener existencial en variedades hispanicas,

INDIVIDUAL GRANTS

•          2019-2020: Two travel grants from the Univ. of Augsburg (Förderprogramm für den wiss. Nachwuchs) for fieldwork in Angola

•          2016: Funding from the Vinzl-Stiftung (Erlangen) for the organization of workshops

•          2014-2017: Travel grants from the DAAD for Conferences in Brazil, Colombia and Peru

•          2014-2015: PostDoc positon (eigene Stelle) funded by the programm P.R.I.M.E. - Postdoctoral Researchers International Mobility Experience. CoFund from the DAAD and the European Research Council

•          2009: DAAD-scholarship (Stipendium zur wissenschaftlichen Aus- und Fortbildung in Deutschland)

•          2005-2009: State scholarship from the Spanish Ministery of Education / Programm FPU (Formacion de Profesorado Universitario) (most recognized PhD scholarship in the Spanish High Education system)

GRANTS FOR RESEARCH GROUPS / CONFERENCES

•          2022: Funding from the DFG for the organization of the 20th Annual Conference of the Association of Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified Creoles through its programme International Scientific Events (Ref. Nr.: GU 1846/2-1)

•          2017-2018: Kombiseminar Spanisch

(https://www.fau.de/education/lehre-an-der-fau/foerderprogramme-fuer-die-lehre/innovationsfonds-lehre/). Programm Innovationsfonds Lehre (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) / An interdisciplinary approach for the

teaching/acquisition of the Spanish language (s. Gutierrez Mate/Uhl, in press; Uhl/Gutierrez Mate/Schwanke 2019)

AWARDS AND OTHER RECOGNITION OF MY SCIENTIFIC CAREER

•          “Honorable Mention” by the Asociacion de Lingü^stica y Filolog^a de America Latina (2015) for the PhD thesis

•          Top-3 on official lists for professorships in the German-speaking area: Assitenzprofessur [=Juniorprofessur] für "Sprache und Raum in der Iberoromania" (Universität Zürich) ^ Nr. 3 (2017)

•          In addition to the former, I received invitations for W1/Junior-Professorships for Romance Linguistics at the Universities of Mainz (2013) and Basel (2018), as well as invitations for W2/W3-Professorships at the Universities of Munich (LMU) (2022) and Innsbruck (2022)

-           Extensive teaching experience at the Universities of Valladolid, LMU Munich, Erlangen-Nuremberg, UC Irvine, Regensburg and Augsburg (mostly "Pro-/Hauptseminare" and "Übungen");

Memberships:

-           Deutscher Hispanistenverband

-           Deutscher Lusitanistenverband

-           Association of Portuguese and Spanish-Lexified Creoles (ACBLPE) (directive committee)

-           Asociacion de Lingüfstica y Filologfa de America Latina (ALFAL)

-           Participation in ongoing research projects and international networks:

-           Corpus Historique du Substandard Frangais (directed by Harald Thun & Joachim Steffen). Stay at the colonial archive of Aix-en-Provence in September-October (since 2018).

-           Sektion Iberoamerika des Zentralinstituts für Regionenforschung (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) (since 2016)

-           Forschungsnetzwerk LATinBAY (Lateinamerika in Bayern) (funded by Bayerisches Hochschulzentrum für Lateinamerika) (since its creation in June 2018)

-           International Network of Address Research (INAR) (https://inarweb.wordpress.com/) (since 2015)

Participation in past research projects:

-           Analisis historico del discurso en el espanol de Colombia (FFI2012-31205) (Universidad de Valladolid, Departamento de Lengua Espanola). Funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, Proyecto I+D. Duration: 2013-2014

-           Hacia el estudio de la variacion multidimensional: un nuevo corpus para el estudio historico del espanol de Colombia (FFI2008-02105) (Universidad de Valladolid, Departamento de Lengua Espanola). Funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, Proyecto I+D. Duration: 2009-2011

Coordination and organization of Conferences:

-           Organization of the section “Lusophone Varietäten und Sprachkontakt in Afrika: Kontinuitäten und Brüche in multilingualen Szenarien von den ersten Kontakten bis zu den aktuellen postkolonialen Verhältnissen” at the 14. Lusitanistentag (to be held in Leipzig, September 2021)

-           Organization of the 13. International Congress of the Association of German Lusitanists (13. Lusitanistentag, Augsburg Sept. 2019)

-           Organization of the section Extra-Romance Structures at the 35. Romanistentag Zürich, October 2017 (with Uli Reich, Melanie Uth and Mana del Mar Vanrell)

-           Organization of the workshop Setting the role of substrates in the origin of Romance-based Creoles (Erlangen, 8.7.2016)

-           Organization of the section 3.6 (Cleft sentences in the Spanish speaking world) at the 20. Hispanistentag (Heidelberg, 19.-22. March 2015) (with Elena Diez del Corral)

-           Organization of the conference La creacion de un estandar para la preparacion y edicion del documento hispanico (Valladolid, 24-25 May 2007) (with Micaela Carrera de la Red)

Languages:

-           English: teaching experience in USA (2015); C1-certificate, classes at C2-level (Univ. of Erlangen 2017).

-           French: teaching and research experience; B2-certificate, classes at C1-level (Univ. of Lausanne 2013-2016)

-           German: extensive teaching experience (2010-2014, 2016-2021); Certificate DSH-III [=C2 level] (Univ. of Munich 2010).

-           Portuguese: teaching and research experience for the Habilitationsschrift; extensive fieldwork in Angola

-           Spanish: native speaker.