Bridget Drinka, Ph.D.
Professor/Department Chair
Professional Info: Curriculum Vitae
Email: bridget.drinka@utsa.edu
Phone: (210) 458-5130
Fax: (210) 458-5366
Office: MB 2.314A
Specialization
History of English, principles of linguistics, historical and sociolinguistics, linguistic methods of analyzing literature.
Biography
Dr. Drinka received her B.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her M.S. from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Indo-European and historical linguistics. As a member of the UTSA faculty since 1991, her research has focused on such issues as the sociolinguistic motivations for language change, the role of contact in linguistic innovation, and the importance of geographical contiguity in the diffusion of changes across the Indo-European languages. Her forthcoming book, Language Contact in Europe: The perfect tense through history (Cambridge University Press), explores the complex development of a grammatical category as it spread across the map of Europe. Dr. Drinka is also working on a corpus analysis of Late Middle and Early Modern English, exploring, among other factors, the role that family networks played in transmitting and fostering change. A Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Moscow State University in 1998 and visiting professor at two German universities (Düsseldorf in 2002 and Osnabrück in 2007-8), she has recently been named as a fellow in the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, an honor which entails the presentation of several lectures and participation in symposia and seminars in Japan in September, 2008. She was also recipient of the University of Texas Chancellor’s Council Outstanding Teaching Award in 1999.
Publications
Recent Courses
Undergraduate
- History of English
- Historical and Sociolinguistics (English Senior Seminar)
- Structure of English
- Language and Gender (English Senior Seminar)
Graduate
- History of English
- Historical and Sociolinguistics
- Languages of the Borderlands
- Indo-European Language and Culture