Ph.D. candidate Vanessa Revheim was awarded the UGA Graduate School's prestigious Dissertation Completion Award (DCA)—a highly competitive, university-wide assistantship given to outstanding doctoral students in their final year. Designed to recognize top scholars, the award provides recipients with dedicated, full-time focus to write their dissertations. For Vanessa, this award enables her to fully immerse herself in fieldwork with the Brazilian community in Marietta, GA, challenging traditional views on heritage speakers by validating home language varieties and bridging linguistic theory with community advocacy.

Below, Vanessa shares the story behind her work, her research findings, and her plans for the future:

Lira: Could you tell us about your dissertation and the central question or problem that guides your research?
My dissertation project, titled “Aspect and Feature Reassembly: How Brazilian Portuguese Heritage Speakers in Georgia Perceive and Produce the Present Perfect and the Imperfect,” addresses a critical gap in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics by examining an understudied population often neglected in broader discussions of Latinidad: Brazilian migrants in the US, specifically within the community of Marietta, GA. I examine the grammar of heritage speakers, individuals who speak a home language within a dominant societal language, for my objective is to understand how they reorganize their grammar to fit their bilingual reality, as proposed by Putnam and Sánchez’s (2013) model of Feature Reassembly. I investigate the relationship between tense (the location of an action in time) and aspect (the internal texture or flow of that action). While English uses a homogeneous Present Perfect (e.g., John has been to NY) which can mean once or many times, Portuguese only allows iteration (e.g., João tem ido a NY), lit. ‘John has been to NY (multiple times)’. Results from my research in California suggest a shift in this aspectual mapping, showing that generation and age of immigration significantly predict the acceptability of English-aligned interpretations, as in *João tem ido a NY uma vez  ‘John has been to NY once’. By confirming that heritage speakers are dynamically reassembling features into a unique bilingual configuration, my work directly challenges models that label heritage grammars as “incomplete” or “deficient.” ). This project connects linguistic theory with the realities of migration by acknowledging the specificities of Brazilian Portuguese in contact-induced situations.

Lira: What initially drew you to this topic, and how has your research developed during your doctoral studies?
My work is personally inspired by the story of my uncle, who is a heritage speaker of Portuguese that moved to the US at a very young age. As I grew older, I experienced his native language proficiency being affected by societal attitudes towards multilingual speakers, which left him between cultures. My lifestory, combined with two decades of teaching across K-12 and higher education in the US, Brazil, and Chile, drove my desire to validate home language varieties and contribute to our collective understanding of the multilingual mind. Since starting my doctoral program, I have presented at seven high-profile international academic conferences and built a publication record of five refereed works (three single-authored, two co-authored) across journal articles, book chapters, and proceedings. I have actively mentored undergraduate and MA students while maintaining a productive pipeline with faculty, with two additional conference proceedings and a book chapter currently under review. At UGA, my research has been consistently supported by competitive internal grants. I have leveraged this funding to build an international professional network and conduct complex fieldwork with the Brazilian community in Southern California, experience that directly informs my dissertation fieldwork in Marietta.

Lira: What does having dedicated time to work on your dissertation mean for you at this stage of your doctoral studies?
Receiving the Dissertation Completion Award provides the gift of uninterrupted time. Fieldwork with migrant communities requires building trust and conducting nuanced experimental tasks, all of which demand sustained presence. The DCA allows me to fully immerse myself in the Marietta community, complete data analysis, and synthesize my findings without balancing full-time teaching duties. It transforms my final doctoral year into a focused, highly productive period of writing and community engagement.

Lira: What has been the most rewarding or unexpected aspect of working on your dissertation so far?
The most rewarding aspect has been the human connection with participants. I have had the opportunity to meet second-generation heritage speakers and their parents, learning from their migration stories, and finding echoes of my own family’s history. During research sessions, heritage speakers often begin with hesitation, assuming their home Portuguese is “less valid” because they feel it differs from standard monolingual norms. This is a reality that directly mirrors both the academic literature and my uncle’s experience. Seeing their reaction when they realize my work validates their speech as a legitimate, complex bilingual system is profound. Researching grammar unexpectedly turns into a transformative conversation about identity, diaspora, and cultural pride.

Lira: As you work toward completing your dissertation, what are you most looking forward to exploring or accomplishing with your research?
I am looking forward to building the groundwork for the first publicly available corpus of Heritage Brazilian Portuguese. Primary data collection is often a massive barrier for researchers, and creating an open-access repository will democratize future research in Heritage Portuguese. Academically, I aspire to join a research environment where I can contribute to programs that prioritize bilingualism, heritage language education, and linguistic diversity. Beyond academia, I look forward to translating my empirical findings into heritage language pedagogy, creating classroom interventions that provide the specific semantic mapping heritage speakers need to distinguish both languages while validating the uniqueness of their home varieties. My long-term goal is to bridge the gap between empirical research and the communities that make it possible. By sharing my findings with community organizations and families, many of whom have expressed a deep commitment to maintaining Portuguese across generations, I want to foster an environment where heritage languages are reclaimed as vibrant, public expressions of identity and belonging. 

We invite our department community to join us in celebrating Vanessa on this outstanding achievement! Her work not only advances the field of Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics but also honors and uplifts the vibrant heritage language communities right here in Georgia. We look forward to following the impact of her research as she completes her dissertation this year.