Kathleen Guerra is an associate teaching professor and intermediate Spanish language coordinator at the University of Denver in Colorado, U.S. She received her PhD in Spanish from the University of California, Davis, in 2020, specializing in sociolinguistics and second-language acquisition. Her research and curriculum development focus on critical and student-centered approaches to language learning, as well as the perception and negotiation of dialectal variation and identity in Ecuadorian Spanish. Her work examines how language ideologies shape judgments about linguistic correctness and appropriateness, how speakers attach social and cultural meanings to particular ways of speaking, and how these beliefs influence language learning and teaching. She has also contributed to research on language contact, bilingual language processing, and task-based approaches to second-language teaching.
Kathleen examines the use of dar + gerund (for example, dame pasando, “pass me”) as a way of making requests in Ecuadorian Andean Spanish. It explores how this distinctive form communicates more than politeness, revealing subtle meanings about familiarity, equality, social relationships, and the level of imposition involved in a request. The study shows how a particular grammatical construction can carry important social and cultural meanings.
Kathleen explores how dar + gerund, a distinctive way of making requests in Northern Andean Spanish, is connected to language, culture, and identity. Drawing on 450 Twitter posts, it explores how people express both criticism and support for this form, showing how attitudes toward language can reflect wider ideas about cultural identity, discrimination, and belonging.
Guerra, K. S., & Bradley, T. G. (2022). Phonological and Phonetic Aspects of Sifeísmo in Quito Spanish. In R. Gomez, E. O’Rourke, & C. Garcia (Eds.), Ecuadorian Spanish in the 21st Century: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (pp. 227–250). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars.
This chapter examines sifeísmo, a distinctive feature of informal Quito Spanish in which words such as sí (“yes”) and no can take an emphatic final -f. It explores how this pronunciation pattern developed and what it reveals about the sounds and linguistic patterns characteristic of Spanish spoken in Quito.