Profile:

Elisabeth Mayer is a lecturer in Spanish Studies in the School of Language Studies. She holds a Master of Arts degree (2004) in Linguistics and a PhD in Linguistics (2010) from the Australian National University. Before joining the ANU she studied Anglistics, Romance languages and Philology and European Ethnology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She also has a translator’s degree in Spanish, French and German from the same University. Currently she is the ACT chair of OzCLO (www.ozclo.org.au).

Awards

2010: Vice-Chancellor’s Travel Grant for fieldwork in Peru-Boliva

2008: Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Education for the Spanish Program

2006: Faculty of Arts Fieldwork Grant for data collection in Lima, Peru

1977: Grant for Excellency in Academic Performance University of Innsbruck

Research interests:

Spanish and Andean Spanish, language contact and change, variation in nonstandardized dialects – specifically in syntax, mophology, information structure and interfaces, fieldwork data and formal theory, linguistic competence in language acquisition.

Current project

·         Migration and variation

·         Stability of the Andean Spanish continuum 

·         Contact and grammaticalization

PhD project

Title: Syntactic variation in object arguments in Limeño contact varieties

The PhD thesis, passed in December 2010, explored the complex relationship between primary agreement through object marking or differential object marking, and secondary agreement through clitics in nonstandardized variation data from Limeño Spanish contact varieties.

Supervisor: Dr. Avery Andrews

Selected publications:

Selected publications

2008. “Clitics on the Move: from Dependent Marking to Split Marking”. Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference, Sydney University (Australia). 4-6 July. Proceedings of LFG08, edited by M. Butt and T. Holloway-King. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/13/lfg08.html

2006. “Optional Direct Object Clitic Doubling in Limeño Spanish”. Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference, University of Konstanz (Germany) 10-13 July. Proceedings of LFG06, edited by M. Butt and T. Holloway-King. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/11/lfg06mayer.pdf

2004. Clitic Doubling in Limeño: A Case Study in LFG. MA thesis, ANU (link to come)