Kate Bellamy is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Linguistics. Her research focuses on P’urhepecha, a language isolate spoken in Michoacán, Mexico. She is particularly interested in its lexical semantics and morphological composition, as well as how it is used – and varies – in language contact situations. From 2023-2026 she is working on the NWO-funded Veni project "Language Variation at home and abroad: the case of P'urhepecha in Mexico and its US diaspora". She also conducts research into code-switching and grammatical gender in multiple language combinations.

More information about Kate Bellamy

Fields of interest

• P’urhepecha
• Lexical semantics
• Code-switching
• Language contact
• Language variation and change
• Dialectology
• Grammatical gender

Research

My research focuses mainly on P’urhepecha, a language isolate spoken in Michoacán, Mexico. I am interested in how speakers of P’urhepecha talk about different domains, such as smell, texture, or the body, and how they package this information morphologically. In addition, I am interested in what happens to the language when it is in contact with Spanish, for example, and how speakers use both languages in the same sentence or even word (“code-switching”). I also investigate how grammatical gender is incorporated into code-switched utterances, using experimental and naturalistic data from a variety of language pairs.

My current NWO-funded Veni project investigates dialectal/geographic variation in P’urhepecha. By documenting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns among speakers in Mexico and the US diaspora, I aim to identify the sources of any observed variation or change. It will be accompanied by an open-access dialect atlas which will serve as an online resource for speakers, learners and researchers of the language.

Grants and awards

• 2023: Newberry Library (Chicago) Short-Term residential Fellowship
• 2022: NWO Veni project “Language variation at home and abroad: the case of P’urhepecha in Mexico and its US diaspora”
• 2022: ELDP-MPI Glottobank fieldwork grant
• 2019: Marie Curie-Skłodowska Individual Fellowship (Europe)
• 2016: Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship, University of Chicago Libraries Special Collections

Curriculum vitae

Key publications

• Parafita Couto, M. Carmen, Kate Bellamy & Felix Ameka. 2023. Theoretical linguistic approaches to multilingual code-switching. In: Jennifer Cabrelli, Adel Chaouch-Orozco, Jorge González Alonso, Sergio M. Pereira Soares, Eloi Puig-Mayenco & Jason Rothman (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Third Language Acquisition and Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 403-436.
• Bellamy, Kate. 2022. The numeral system of P’urhepecha: Historical and typological perspectives. STUF - Language Typology & Universals 75(2): 1-42.
• Bellamy, Kate & M. Carmen Parafita Couto. 2022. Gender assignment in mixed noun phrases: State of the art. In: Dalila Ayoun (Ed.), The Acquisition of Gender: Crosslinguistic perspectives, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 14-48.
• Bellamy, Kate. 2021. Let me count the way it stinks: A typology of olfactory terms in Purepecha. In: Łukasz Jedrzejowski & Przemesław Staniewski (Eds.), The Linguistics of Olfaction: Typological and Diachronic Approaches to Synchronic Diversity, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 137-170.
• Bellamy, Kate & Martha Mendoza. 2021. Body-part terms and morphological complexity in P’urhepecha. Cahiers de lexicologie, 119: 51-71.

Publications