Matthew Kanwit

  • Associate Professor

Courses Taught

LING 1650 Acquisition of Variation
LING 1773 Morphology
LING 1777 Syntactic Theory
LING 2146 Second Language Acquisition
LING 2235/LING 1235: Language, Gender, and Sexuality
LING 2394 Spanish Dialectology
LING 2397 Hispanic Linguistics Special Topics: Acquisition of Variation
LING 2773 Morphology/LING 1873 Accelerated Morphology

 

Education & Training

  • PhD, Indiana University
  • MA, University of Georgia
  • BA, University of Richmond (VA)

Representative Publications

Representative Publications
* = graduate student or former advisee co-author 


Kanwit, M., & Solon, M. (Eds.). (2023). Communicative Competence in a Second Language: Theory, Method, and Applications. London: Routledge.

Kanwit, M. (2022). Sociolinguistic competence: What we know so far and where we’re heading. In K. Geeslin (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics (pp. 30-44). London: Routledge. 

Solon, M., & Kanwit, M. (2022). New methods for tracking development of sociophonetic competence: Exploring a preference task for Spanish /d/ deletion. Applied Linguistics, 43(4), 805-825. 

Kanwit, M., & Geeslin, K. (2020). Sociolinguistic competence and interpreting variable structures in a second language: A study of the copula contrast in native and second-language Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 42(4), 775-799. Full text link: Cambridge Core  

Kanwit, M., & *Terán, V. (2020). Ideas buenas o buenas ideas: Phonological, semantic, and frequency effects on variable adjective ordering in rioplatense Spanish. Languages, 5(4), 65.  (Open Access full text). (Special issue: Revisiting Language Variation and Change: Looking at Metalinguistic Categories Through a Usage-Based Lens). 

*Hadodo, M., & Kanwit, M. (2020). Menos masculino, demasiado infantil: How age and gender ideologies index sexuality in perception of diminutives in Madrid Spanish. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 9(2), 127-151.

Kanwit, M. (2019). Beyond the present indicative: Lexical futures as indicators of development in L2 Spanish. Modern Language Journal, 103(2), 481 -501. 

Kanwit, M., *Elias, V., & *Clay, R. (2018). Acquiring intensifier variation abroad: exploring muy and bien in Spain and Mexico. Foreign Language Annals, 51(2), 455-471. 

Kanwit, M., & Geeslin, K.L. (2018). Exploring lexical effects in second language interpretation: The case of mood in Spanish adverbial clauses. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40, 579-603. 

Kanwit, M. (2017). What we gain by combining variationist and concept-oriented approaches: The case of acquiring Spanish future-time expression. Language Learning, 67(2), 461-498. 
 

Research Interest Summary

Hispanic Linguistics, L2 Acquisition, Sociolinguistic Variation, Morphosyntax

Research Interests

Matt Kanwit’s research in Hispanic Linguistics focuses on the intersection of second language (L2) acquisition and sociolinguistic variation. Specifically, he is interested in the L2 acquisition of variable morphosyntactic structures, the effect of study abroad on acquisition, and native-speaker morphosyntactic variation in Spanish. A longer description of his research and more links to his work can be found at his personal page.

Research Cluster