Professor Catherine Travis
Areas of expertise
- Linguistics 2004
- Language In Culture And Society (Sociolinguistics) 200405
- Language In Time And Space (Incl. Historical Linguistics, Dialectology) 200406
- Linguistic Structures (Incl. Grammar, Phonology, Lexicon, Semantics) 200408
- Iberian Languages 200308
Research interests
Catherine’s research interests lie in questions related to the ways in which linguistic and social factors impact on language variation and change. She works within the variationist framework, and addresses these questions through the study of the spontaneous spoken language of members of well-defined speech communities. Her primary current research projects include 'Voices of Regional Australia', examining regional Australian English using data from bushfire stories (funded by an ARC DP); the 'Sydney Speaks' project, examining variation and change in English spoken in Sydney, by diverse communities including migrant communities (funded as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language; http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/sydney-speaks/); the Language Data Commons of Australia project, which is building digital infrastructure for the Humanities (funded through the ARDC, https://ardc.edu.au/news/a-national-language-data-commons-for-australia/); and the New Mexico Spanish-English codeswitching project, examining the Spanish of a bilingual community in New Mexico, USA (deriving from a project funded by the NSF; https://nmcode-switching.la.psu.edu/nmseb).
Biography
Catherine Travis is Professor of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She holds a Bachelor of Asian Studies with First Class Honours in Linguistics and Japanese from the ANU, and a PhD in Linguistics and Spanish from La Trobe University (2002). She came to the ANU in 2012 from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA, where she worked for 10 years. She is a NAATI certified translator, Spanish-English.
Researcher's projects
Current Grants
2023-2026: "Voices of regional Australia". ARC DP ($350,000)
2021-2024: “Language Data Commons Australia (LDaCA) – HASS RDC”, ARDC . Lead CI – Michael Haugh: https://ardc.edu.au/collaborations/strategic-activities/hass-and-indigenous-research-data-commons/project-plans/
2021-2023: “Language Data Commons Australia (LDaCA) – Data Partnerships”, ARDC ($AUD500,000). Lead CI – Michael Haugh: https://ardc.edu.au/project/language-data-commons-of-australia-ldaca/
Past Grants
2014-2022: ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language ($AUD28 million). Lead CI - Nick Evans: http://dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/
Project: "Sydney Speaks": https://legacy.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/stories/sydney_speaks.php
2019: "Accented Australian English for Acoustic Modelling", Defence Science and Technology Group ($AUD65,000)
2014-2016: "A national language studies portal for Australian universities", Office of Learning and Teaching ($AUD300,000). Lead CI - Jane Simpson: www.ulpa.edu.au
2010-2013: "Evaluating convergence via code-switching: Cross-linguistic priming, rates and the structure of subject expression" (http://nmcode-switching.la.psu.edu) (National Science Foundation BCS 1019112/1019122 [2010-2013]). Co-Investigator: Rena Torres Cacoullos (The Pennsylvania State University) ($US270,000)
Available student projects
I am interested in supervising work in sociolinguistics, and the study of variation and change. I particularly welcome students who would like to contribute to the 'Voices of Regional Australia' or 'Sydney Speaks' projects, but I am also available for supervision in areas related to Australian English more broadly, Australian community languages, language contact, and Hispanic Linguistics.
Current student projects
PhD theses, as Chair of Panel
Heba Bou Orm. Language and identity among Lebanese youth (2022-)
Past student projects
(As primary supervisor)
ANU PhD theses
Matthew Callaghan. 2020. "Who are you?” in Chile: gauging variation and change in language and society.
Gan Qiao. 2024. Ethnic variation in its social context: Evidence from the English of Chinese Australians.
Fariba Shirali. 2020. Disagreement in Persian academic discussions. (supervision 2019-2020)
Elena Sheard. 2023. Explaining language change over the lifespan: A panel and trend analysis of Australian English.
ANU MA theses
Heba Bou Orm. 2021. Ethnolectal variation in Lebanese Australian English.
Inas Ghina. 2019. (t) Glottalization in Acehnese Language Varieties.
Li Nguyen. 2016. Incorporated kin terms, bilingual speakers: A corpus-based study of Vietnamese kin terms as personal reference in bilingual speech.
Sze Tsui. 2020. Variation and change in the usage of written Cantonese in Hong Kong.
Shuyu Zhang. 2015. Who am I when I say I speak Chinese? Ethnic Orientation and Heritage Language in Second-Generation Chinese Australians. Austrlaian National University.
ANU Honours theses
Kiya Alimoradian. 2012. “Makes me feel more Aussie”: Ethnic identity and the use of mate by Australians from a non-English speaking background.
Esther Lee. 2020. Quotatives in Australian English: Ethnicity and change over time.
Bonnie Mclean. 2019. Ideophones in space and time: a look at Japonic.
Jennifer Plaistowe. 2015. Coordinated code-switching: A study of interactive alignment in bilingual conversation.
Marcel Reverter-Rambaldi. 2020. Topic modelling in spontaneous speech data.
Amy Sanson. 2020. Automated topic segmentation of Sydney Speaks dialogues for enhanced linguistic analysis. (Computer Science)
University of New Mexico PhD Theses
Sonia Balasch. 2011. Estudio sociolingüístico de la marca diferencial de objeto directo (DOM) en dos variedades del español contemporáneo (‘A sociolinguistic study of Differential Object Marking in two contemporary varieites of Spanish'.)
Manuel Burgos. 2013. El conflicto armado a través de El Tiempo: Análisis discursivo de los reportes de guerra en la prensa colombiana (1998-2008) (‘The armed conflict through El Tiempo: A discourse analysis of war reports in the Colombian Press’).
Jenny Dumont. 2011. Full NPs in conversations and narratives: The effects of genre on information flow and interaction.
Mami McCraw. 2010. First-person singular pronouns and ellipsis in Japanese.
Daniel Sanford. 2010. Frequency and figuration: A usage-based approach to metaphor.
Agripino Silveira. 2011. Frequency effects and specialization of forms in pronominal expression in Brazilian Portuguese.
Damian Vergara Wilson. 2009. From ‘remaining’ to ‘becoming’: A diachronic usage-based approach to the expression of ‘becoming’: quedar(se) + adjective.
Publications
- Travis, Catherine E. and Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2023. Form and function covariation: Obligation modals in Australian English. Language Variation and Change: 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000200
- Travis, Catherine E., James Grama and Benjamin Purser. 2023. Stability and change in (ing): Ethnic and grammatical variation over time in Australian English. English World-Wide 44(3): 435-469. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.22043.tra
- Qiao, Gan and Catherine E. Travis. 2022. Ethnicity and social class in pre-vocalic the in Australian English. In Rosey Billington (Ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 56-60): Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association. https://sst2022.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/qiao-travis-2022-ethnicity-and-social-class-in-pre-vocalic-the-in-australian-english.pdf
- Travis, Catherine & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2021. Categories and frequency: Cognition verbs in Spanish subject expression. Languages (Special Issue ‘Revisiting Language Variation and Change: Looking at Metalinguistic Categories Through a Usage-Based Lens’, eds. Brown & Rivas) 6(3): 126. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6030126
- Travis, Catherine E. and Inas Ghina. 2021. Gender, mobility and contact: Stability and change in an Acehnese dialect. Asia-Pacific Language Variation. 7(2): 142-167. https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.20007.tra
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Travis, Catherine E. 2021. Alternating or mixing languages. In Danae Pérez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek and Daniel Schreier (eds), English and Spanish: World languages in Interaction, 287-311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Callaghan, Matthew and Catherine E. Travis. 2021. Priming as a diagnostic of grammatical constructions: Second-person singular in Chilean Spanish. Languages 6(1): 1. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2020. The role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures. In Dale Koike and J. César. Félix-Brasdefer (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics, 129-147. London/New York: Routledge.
- Grama, James, Catherine E. Travis and Simon Gonzalez. 2020. Ethnolectal and community change ov(er) time: Word-final (er) in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 40(3): 346-368. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2020.1823818
- Purser, Ben, Grama, James & Travis, Catherine 2020, 'Australian English over Time: Using Sociolinguistic Analysis to Inform Dialect Coaching', Voice & Speech Review, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 269-291.
- Gonzalez, Simon, Grama, James and Travis, Catherine E. 2020. Comparing the performance of forced aligners used in sociophonetic research. Linguistics Vanguard 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0058
- Hualde, José Ignacio, Olarrea, Antxon, Escobar, Anna, Travis, Catherine E., Sanz, Cristina. 2020, Introducción a la Lingüística Hispánica (3rd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Barth, Danielle, Grama, James, Gonzalez, Simon & Travis, Catherine E. 2020. Using forced alignment for sociophonetic research on a minority language. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (Selected Papers from NWAV 47) 25(2): Article 2, Available at https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol25/iss2/2/
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Travis, Catherine E. 2019. Gramáticas en contacto en un corpus bilingüe (‘Grammars in contact in a bilingual corpus’; Special Issue on: Corpus y construcciones: Perspectivas hispánicas). Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxía 79(1): 13-40. https://dx.doi.org/10.15304/9788417595876.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2019. Variationist typology: Shared probabilistic constraints across (non-)null subject languages, Linguistics, 57(3):653-692.
- Grama, James, Travis, Catherine E. & Gonzalez, Simon. 2019, 'Initiation, Progression, and Conditioning of the Short-Front Vowel Shift in Australia', 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, ed. Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain and Paul Warren, Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., Australia, pp. 1769-1773.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2018. Discovering structure: Person and accessibility', in Naomi L. Shin and Deniel Erker (ed.), Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy, John Benjamins Publishing Company, United States, pp. 67-90.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2018, Bilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact, Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press.
- Gonzalez Ochoa, S., Travis, C. E., Grama, J., Barth, D. & Ananthanarayan, S. 2018, 'Recursive forced alignment: A test on a minority language', 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, ed. Julien Epps, Joe Wolfe, John Smith and Caroline Jones, The Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, Inc., Australia, pp. 145-148.
- Travis, Catherine E., Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Kidd, Evan 2017, 'Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech', Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. 20(2): 283-298.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Lindstrom, Amy M. 2016. Different registers, different grammars? Subject expression in English conversation and narrative. Language Variation and Change 28(1): 103-128.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2016, Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19:733-753.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2015. Beyond questionnaires: Community-based measures of bilingualism. Southwest Journal of Linguistics. 34(1-2): 105-127.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Torres Cacoullos, Rena (Eds). 2015. 'Gauging convergence on the ground: code-switching in the community'. International Journal of Bilingualism (Special Issue). 19(4): 365-480.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena and Travis, Catherine E. 2015. 'Gauging convergence on the ground: Code-switching in the community'. International Journal of Bilingualism. 19(4): 365-386.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2015, 'Foundations for the Study of Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish in Contact with English: Assessing Interlinguistic (Dis)similarity via Intralinguistic Variability', in Ana M Carvalho, Rafael Orozco and Naomi Lapidus Shin (ed.), Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective, Georgetown University Press, United States, pp. 81-100.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2014, 'Stress on I: Debunking unitary contrast accounts', Studies in Language, 38 (2): 360-392.
- Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. 2014. 'Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation', Journal of Pragmatics 63: 19-34.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Timothy Jowan Curnow. 2014, El 'es' enfático del español colombiano. Lenguas en contacto y bilingüismo 5. http://www.lenguasdecolombia.gov.co/revista/ (Translation by Diego Arias Cortés of Travis & Curnow (2004), ‘The emphatic es construction of Colombian Spanish’.)
- Travis, Catherine E.; Hajek, John; Nettelbeck, Colin; Beckmann, Elizabeth; and Woods, Anya (eds). 2014. Practices and Policies: Current research in languages and cultures education. LCNAU. Australia.
- Travis, Catherine E.; Hajek, John; Nettelbeck, Colin; and Woods, Anya. 2014, 'Introduction to "Practices and Policies"', Languages & Cultures Network for Australian Universities Colloquium (LCNAU 2013), ed. C Travis, J Hajek, C Nettelbeck, E Beckmann and A Lloyd-Smith, LCNAU, Australia, pp. 1-5.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena 2013, 'Making Voices Count: Corpus Compilation in Bilingual Communities', Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(2): 170-194.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2013. A portrait of Spanish speakers in Australia. September Festival Magazine, 3(3): 53-55.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2012. El español en los Estados Unidos: una mezcla lingüística (Spanish in the US: a linguistic melting pot), September Festival Magazine, 2(2): 31-33.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Curnow, Timothy Jowan. 2012. Locational adverbs in Colombian Spanish conversation. In Richard File-Muriel and Rafael Orozco (eds), Linguistic Studies in Colombian Varieties of Spanish, 67-88. Madrid: Iberoamericana.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. Discourse syntax. In José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea and Erin O'Rourke (eds), Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, 653-672. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
- Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics. 23 (4), 711-748.
- 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.
- Travis, Catherine E. and Villa, Daniel J. 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.
- Hualde, José Igancio, Olarrea, Antxon, Escobar, Anna Maria, Travis, Catherine E. 2010. Introducción a la Lingüística Hispánica (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, New York.
- 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. & Silveira, Agripino 2009, 'The Role of Frequency in First-Person Plural Variation in Brazilian Portuguese: Nós vs. a gente', Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 347-376.
- Curnow, Timothy Jowan and Catherine E. Travis. 2008. Locational adverbs in non-spatial settings: The case of ahí in Colombian Spanish conversation. In Timothy Jowan Curnow (ed), Selected papers from the 2007 conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. http://www.als.asn.au.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2007, 'Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation', Language Variation and Change, vol. 19, pp. 101-135.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006, 'Subjetivización de construcciones: los verbos 'cognitivos' en el español conversacional', Octavo Encuentro Internacional de Linguistica en el Noroeste, ed. Rosa Maria Ortiz Ciscomani, Universidad de Sonora, Sonora, Mexico, pp. 85-109.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006, 'Dizque: A Colombian evidentiality strategy', Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences, vol. 44, no. 6, pp. 1269-1297.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006, 'The communicative realisation of confianza and calor humano in Colombian Spanish', in Cliff Goddard (ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 199-229.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2006. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to discourse markers. In Kirsten Fischer (ed), Approaches to discourse particles, 219-241. Oxford: Elsevier.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess and Edward J. Rubin (eds), Theoretical and experimental approaches to Romance linguistics: Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, 2004, 329-349. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2005, Discourse Markers in Colombian Spanish: A Study in Polysemy, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, Germany.
- Travis, C 2004, 'The ethnopragmatics of the diminutive in conversational Colombian Spanish', Intercultural Pragmatics, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 249-274.
- Curnow, Timothy Jowan and Catherine E. Travis. 2004. The emphatic es construction of Colombian Spanish. In Christo Moskovsky (ed), Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, http://www.als.asn.au.
- Travis, Catherine E. 2003. The semantics of the Spanish subjunctive: Its use in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Cognitive Linguistics 14(1): 47-69.
Projects and Grants
Grants information is drawn from ARIES. To add or update Projects or Grants information please contact your College Research Office.
- Voices of Regional Australia: The linguistic patterning of local attachment (Primary Investigator)
- Language Data Commons of Australia (Secondary Investigator)
- Language Data Commons of Australia HASS RDC (LDaCA-RDC) (Secondary Investigator)
- Accented Australian English for Acoustic Modelling (Primary Investigator)
- ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) (Secondary Investigator)
- A national language studies portal for Australian universities (Secondary Investigator)
