Rachel Milito on Advertising, Second Person Singular Address, and Salavadoran Spanish
In the summer of 2025, Rachel Milito used a grant from the Georgetown Americas Institute to attend the International Network of Address Researchers (INAR) 8th Annual Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
At this conference, she shared original research regarding Spanish second-person singular address (2PS) forms present in the advertising of multinational fast-food restaurants in Latin America and received valuable feedback on this research that allowed her to turn the project into a manuscript that will be published next year.
The conference also gave her the opportunity to meet other scholars from around the world who specialize in the study of address forms in Latin America. These linguistic items form the basis of her doctoral thesis, which will examine the Spanish spoken by Salvadorans in Washington, DC.
Engaging with the research of international scholars helped Milito hone the methodology for her dissertation, which she has since started working on. The GAI grant helped kick start her research. She shared that she is confident that the connections that she made will serve her well for the rest of her tenure as a doctoral student at Georgetown, and beyond.