Spring 2007

No classes

Jeff Turley, Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics, is exactly as old as the Space Age, having been born simultaneously with the launching of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. He entered BYU as a piano performance major, but upon returning from a mission to Peru he abandoned the idea of music as a career, choosing instead the fame and wealth that attends the life of a Spanish professor. After completing two degrees in Spanish linguistics (BA and MA) at BYU, he felt equally drawn to linguistics and medieval literature. The painful dilemma of choosing between these fields found a happy resolution at the University of California, Berkeley, which offered a doctoral program in Romance Philology. This degree combined equal attention to the historical development of the major Romance languages and the Romance medieval literatures.

Dr. Turley was hired by BYU in 1989. His research interests include etymology, the pragmatics, semantics and semiotics of pronoun systems, markedness theory, and historical morphosyntax. He belongs to several linguistic professional associations, and has read numerous papers at national and international conferences.

Prof. Turley teaches the gamut of Spanish linguistics courses (introduction to Spanish linguistics, phonetics, contrastive English-Spanish linguistics, history of the Spanish language, syntactic theory, semantics, Romance Philology, third- and fourth-year grammar) plus medieval Spanish literature. He has been the director of the Madrid Study Abroad program twice, and has also directed a study abroad program to the Dominican Republic. He shares the direction of the Mexico Literacy program with Dr. Ted Lyon.

Prof. Turley is married to Susan M. Quebbeman, and has three children, Rachel, Diana and Jesse, with whom he loves to play soccer, basketball and go camping.