Robert Esposito, one of our undergraduate seniors has been awarded the Henry Rutgers Scholar Award for his outstanding performance on his senior year research project. Prof. Mariapaola D’Imperio was his main faculty advisor.
Robert’s honors thesis is the first work on the variety of Spanish spoken in El Salvador offering a comprehensive view of the intonational phonology system and tune usage to convey various speech acts. Robert’s work was impressive because, despite the Covid situation, he recorded El Salvador speakers over zoom, learned intonations labeling and devised a system with contrastive elements that is specific to Salvadoran Spanish. He even discovered very interesting systematic variants within the participants, related to the city of origin (on the same side of the isogloss determined by segmental phonology patterns), for vocatives and question tunes. His work has already been presented at an undergraduate conference in Berkeley and is extremely relevant for work on intonational variability, dialect exposure and conveying meaning that Prof. D’Imperio is leading in the intonational community. Finally, Robert has shown a very big drive and independence for conducting this work, which is remarkable at the undergraduate level.
Needless to say, we are extremely proud of Robert’s achievement!
Congratulations to both Robert and Prof D’Imperio!