Christina Tortora (College of Staten Island/Graduate Center (CUNY)) has
extensive fieldwork experience. From 1994–2001, she conducted fieldwork on
Borgomanerese, spoken in Borgomanero, a town in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy
(from 1995-1997 this work was funded by an NSF Grant for Improving Doctoral
Dissertation Research). Her data collection resulted in her PhD thesis, several articles,
and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to write a comparative
grammar of the dialect. She also designed and taught a field-methods course at the
University of Michigan, which employed a native speaker (Agnese Salvatori) of
Loianese, an Emilian dialect, and has given several lectures on field research issues.
In 2001, she began the study of Appalachian syntax with Bridget Anderson (who is
a native speaker of an Appalachian variety, and who at the time was a student at the
University of Michigan).
Through a seed grant ($5,000) from the City University of New
York (PSC-CUNY Grant #60052-32-33: The Syntax of Appalachian English; project
period: April 1, 2002–December 31, 2003), Tortora initiated work on this project at
CUNY. She made a preliminary trip in March 2002 to the Center for Appalachian
Studies and Services (CASS) at East Tennessee State University (ETSU, in Johnson City,
Tennessee), to investigate the Archives of Appalachia as a potential research site. The
grant supported two subsequent trips to the Archives (accompanied by Judy Bernstein).
These three trips resulted in substantial data collection and establishment of contacts in
the eastern Tennessee region of Appalachia. Since then, she has given two conference
presentations on the project and an invited lecture with Judy Bernstein at CASS’s
Appalachian, Scottish, and Irish Studies Summer School; she has also published an
invited article with Judy Bernstein for Now and Then magazine (published by CASS; the
magazine promotes Appalachian culture, heritage, and interests), and has published two
articles, one on dialects spoken in mountainous regions (“La variazione sintattica e i
dialetti appalachiani,” in G. Marcato (ed) I dialetti e la montagna (2003)), and another on
existentials in Appalachian English, forthcoming in American Speech (“The Case of
Appalachian Expletive they”). She also taught an advanced Syntax Seminar at the CUNY
Graduate Center in Fall 2004 on English dialect syntax.