World Languages and Cultures
College of Humanities & Social Sciences
Ph.D., Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Arizona State University
M.A., Spanish Linguistics, Arizona State University
B.S., Spanish, Georgetown University, cum laude
Over the years, Dr. Ryan has done considerable work in grant writing and administration for Georgetown and Arizona State Universities with such units as the Hispanic Research Center and the Office of the Vice President for Education Partnerships where he contributed toward the improvement of educational opportunities for the Latino community. Dr. Ryan’s work has taken him to such places as Spain, Italy, France, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where he has made presentations in both English and Spanish. Other positions he has held included undergraduate advisor for Spanish majors at Arizona State University; cultural coordinator for the American Institute for Foreign Study’s Summer Program in Salamanca, Spain; and English instructor for Centro Británico, also in Salamanca. Before attending college, Professor Ryan was one of five winners of the prestigious Herencia Española National Essay Contest. Since 1983, Dr. Ryan has been a member of Georgetown University’s Lamba Beta Chapter of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society.
Dr. Ryan is a member of the Linguist List (International Linguistics Community), the Linguistic Society of America, the Linguistic Association of the Southwest and the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.
Grammatical errors of heritage (HL) and non-heritage (L2) Spanish speakers compared
Recent combined enrollment of heritage (HL) and non-heritage (L2) speakers in my intermediate Spanish courses (originally designed exclusively for non-heritage students) has created the urgency to rethink the organization, sequence, and emphasis I place on topics and structures in the classroom. Hence, this project present, originally funded by a 2017 Summer Support Initiative grant, compares HL and L2 word- and sentence-level error data I collected from my students in Spring 2017 and examines such questions as how one might continue teaching Spanish grammar to an expanded audience and, at the same time, more effectively address the different needs of both HL and L2 learners. I recently published (in 2018) an article based on this research in the Journal of Language Teaching and Research, and a second article (in 2019) on a new peer-review, self-evaluation module that I have effectively incorporated into my intermediate classes. I also shared my findings with Colorado high school Spanish teachers at a special session of the 2020 Colorado Congress of Foreign Language Teachers meeting. I continue to collect consensual data from my students for this project with an approved IRB protocol.
Early verb project
Verbs are arguably the most important word in any sentence and the much of my theoretical
work concerns itself with the emergence of verbs in first language learners of Spanish
and other languages. This began at UNC with the publication in 2012 of my first book,
The Genesis of Argument Structure: Observations from a Child’s Early Speech Production
in Spanish, in which I provide important evidence for existing verb structure in Spanish speaking
children, even at the one-word stage of production. Since that time, with a 2012 Research
Dissemination and Faculty Development Award, a 2012 Summer Support Initiative Award,
and a Spring 2013 Faculty Reassignment Award, I expanded the project to analyze significant
amounts of additional data from the Child Language Data Exchange System, an online
repository of first language transcripts. These efforts enabled me to corroborate
my original findings with additional Spanish and Italian data, make some new cross-linguistic
observations, present my findings on the developing stages of this project at four
international conferences , and produce six peer-reviewed papers, two most recently
in 2017 and 2020. Future plans include the submission of a proposal to the National
Science Foundation to expand the project to analyze an additional five languages.
A Holistic and Contextual Grammar of Spanish
A future book I am writing, titled Gramática contextual y razonada de la lengua española (roughly translated to English as A Holistic and Contextual Grammar of Spanish). The grammar, for which I have already produced seven chapters, promises to be a
unique, holistic approach to the teaching of advanced Spanish grammar that draws on
my and others’ scholarship from several areas of linguistics, including but not limited
to, historical linguistics, language typology, and an understanding of the basic ways
in which all human languages work. I continue to work on this book as time permits
and plan to finish it during my next sabbatical. Once the manuscript is completed,
I intend to submit it to Georgetown University Press for publication consideration.
Language change within immigrant communities
This large-scale project that studies changes over time in format, content, and more
specifically, language in American immigrant language newspapers of both this century
(in Spanish) and the previous one (in Spanish and Italian) and explores how immigrants
evolve over time in the way they portray (in their own words) the effects of immigration,
the extent of home cultural/linguistic preservation or loss, as well as stages of
target assimilation or transition. In the summer of 2014, I presented preliminary
results of this project at the International Conference on Historic Newspaper Discourse
(CHINED) in Helsinki, Finland. In 2015 and 2016 with the assistance of a second UNC
New Project Program award and a small external grant from the Immigration History
Research Center and Archives at the University of Minnesota, I was able to travel
to both the Rhode Island Historical Society Library and the Immigration History Research
Center and Archives to finish data collection and analysis of Italian data. A peer-reviewed
scholarly paper on this research was published during the period (Ryan 2017) as the
contribution to an edited volume titled Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse.
My new focus has to do with the notion of campanilismo and how the focus of this notion among newspapers shifts from country of origin to
that of the target country. To this end, in summer of 2018, I attended the three-week
Italian American Diaspora Studies Summer School in Rome, Italy, where I shared my
work up to that point and gathered new ideas and information to help with the next
steps of this project.
Project to reconstruct early Ibero Romance
Capstone of most of my scholarship for the past five years examines the structures
of Romance languages other than Spanish (particularly those in the south of Italy),
which I have found to exhibit a number of characteristics that, although unattested
in existing early Spanish texts, would help explain how Latin transitioned to structures
that HAVE been attested in Spanish and other languages of the Iberian Peninsula. This
work was the focus of my recent 2017-2018 sabbatical, . In Spring 2015, a Faculty
Reassignment Award provided me the time necessary to conduct additional research and
to further develop this idea for a peer-reviewed book chapter, published in 2017 by
Ohio State University Press. Expansion of this work to the specific topic of phonology
has yielded yet another peer-reviewed paper for an edited volume titled Production and Perception Mechanisms of Sound Change, sponsored by the University of Salamanca, Spain and published in 2018. A second
paper was produced for another volume in 2021. Since its inception, the developing
stages of this project have yielded nine presentations at annual professional meetings.
My sabbatical produced a book manuscript that integrates my data collection, analysis,
and paper presentation efforts thus far, and will constitute my second published research
book. I am revising the draft of this manuscript with feedback from knowledgeable
colleagues and will submit it for publication.
The Romance diminutive project
Another data-intensive project I have undertaken at UNC has to do with the relexification
of diminutives in the Romance languages, a process whereby the diminutive suffix morpheme
(e.g., -illa ‘little’) has lost its separate “diminutive” meaning and has adjoined
to the word root (e.g., torta ‘cake’), becoming reanalyzed along with that root as
an entirely new single word root or morpheme (e.g., tortilla not meaning ‘little cake’).
Relexification of diminutives is a highly understudied phenomenon, yet it is one of
the most prolific means of new word creation in Spanish. With the assistance of a
2012 UNC New Project Grant and a 2014 Summer Support Initiative Award, I partnered
with Dr. Víctor Parra-Guinaldo, of the American University of Sharjah, and hired undergraduate
research assistants here at UNC to catalog the entirety of historically diminutive
forms in Spanish that have become relexified. This project, which is intensively quantitative,
analyzed data from Stahl and Scavnicky’s Reverse Dictionary of the Spanish Language
(1973), the online Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, as well as the Critical Etymological Dictionary of Castilian and Hispanic Spanish. After analyzing the data in Fall 2013 semester, Dr. Parra-Guinaldo and I presented
project results at both 2014 and 2016 International Conferences on Historical Lexicology
and Lexicography, and most recently, at A joint peer-reviewed article of our findings
was published in 2016. In 2018, I obtained a UNC Summer Support Initiative grant to
collect and analyze data for this same phenomenon in Italian. Since that time, I have
presented comparative results for Spanish and Italian at several conferences, including
the 2017 International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 2019 RMMLA, and 2020
International Conference of Languages and Linguistics. A second article was published
by the the Athens Journal of Philology in 2021.
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