Gabriel Holder

My academic passion is found in the linguistic subfield of phonetics and phonology, specifically where theories on sound change may be applied in contexts of historical linguistics and language contact. A long term goal of mine is to develop fluency in Catalan, which will allow for specific investigations over scenarios of bilingualism and language contact between Spanish and Catalan in eastern Spain. However, my primary research interest is associated with proposing motivations of historical (natural) sound change, mostly through the application of the Optimality Theory and related theories and hypotheses, topics which will appear in my master's thesis. Beyond descriptions of sound change, my thesis will seek to detail the history of and attitudes towards Arabic loanwords in Spanish from a 'pan-chronic' perspective, focusing on the shift in attitudes towards Arabisms and the relationships that native speakers of Spanish have historically associated with Arab-Hispanics. I am also interested in Spanish syntax, with hopes of recording data on native speaker clitic pronoun placement preferences, and second language acquisition, specifically the acquisition of prepositions in Spanish by native speakers of English.