Profile:

Catherine Travis took up the position of Chair of Modern European Languages in the School of Language Studies in 2012. She came from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA, where she worked for 10 years, for five as head of the Hispanic Linguistics program in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Catherine 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. As well as at the University of New Mexico, she has taught at La Trobe University, and has held visiting appointments at the Universidad Autónoma de México, James Cook University (Cairns), and the University of Melbourne.

Research interests:

Catherine’s primary research area is the way in which grammar emerges through discourse, which she investigates through the study of grammatical variation in spontaneous speech. She is a specialist in Spanish, and has also worked on Portuguese, Japanese and English. She has major research projects on the variation in ways speakers use language, both at home and in the diaspora, and what this tells us about the social and cultural meanings of language use. With the rapid growth of Spanish immigration to Australia, research in this area has significant policy and educational implications which extend to other immigrant groups.

Selected publications:

Books

Hualde, José Ignacio, Antxon Olarrea, Anna María Escobar and Catherine E. Travis. 2010. Introducción a la lingüística hispánica (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Travis, Catherine E. 2005. Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy (Cognitive Linguistics Research). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Selected articles and papers

Travis, Catherine E. and Timothy Jowan Curnow. 2012 (In Press). Locational adverbs in Colombian Spanish conversation. In Richard J. File-Muriel and Rafael Orozco (eds.). Linguistic Studies in Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 76-98. Madrid: Iberoamericana.

Travis, Catherine E. and Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. Discourse syntax. In José I. Hualde, Antxon Olarrea and Erin O’Rourke (eds.). Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, 653-672. Blackwell Publishers.
Travis, Catherine E. and Daniel J. Villa. 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.

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.

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. and Agripino Silveira. 2009. The Role of Frequency in First-Person Plural Variation in Brazilian Portuguese: Nós vs. a gente. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. 2(2): 347-376.
 

Travis, Catherine E. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19(2): 101-135.
 

Travis, Catherine E. 2006. Dizque: A Colombian evidentiality strategy. Linguistics 44(6): 1269-1297.

Travis, Catherine E. 2006. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to discourse particles. In Fischer, Kerstin (ed.). Approaches to discourse particles, 219-241. Oxford: Elsevier.
 

Travis, Catherine E. 2006. The communicative realisation of confianza and calor humano in Colombian Spanish. In Goddard, Cliff (ed.). Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context, 199-129. (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 3). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Travis, Catherine E. 2004. The ethnopragmatics of the diminutive in conversational Colombian Spanish. Intercultural pragmatics 1(2): 249-274.

Travis, Catherine E. 2003. The semantics of the Spanish subjunctive: Its use in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Cognitive Linguistics 14(1): 47-69.
 

Travis, Catherine E. 2002. La metalengua semántica natural: The Natural Semantic Metalanguage of Spanish. In Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.). Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and empirical findings, vol. 1, 173-242. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.