Esther Brown

  • Professor
  • Department Chair
  • SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE
Office Hours

Fall 2024 office hours: Tuesdays 3:30 - 4:30 and by appointment

McKenna 133

Research Areas

Usage-based phonology, language variation and change, the Spanish of New Mexico

Selected Articles

  • 2023. “Usage-based approaches to bilingual phonetics and phonology.” The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge. Mark Amengual (Ed.).  

  • 2023. "Variable Indirect Object Pronoun Expression: A usage-based analysis of Galician and Spanish" Referring to Discourse Participants in Ibero-Romance Languages. Language Science Press. Peter Herbeck & Pekka Posio (Eds.). (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2022. Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage. First Language, 42(3), 361-382. (Co-author: Naomi Shin) 

  • 2022. “El infinitivo flexionado en gallego: Un análisis léxico basado en el uso.” In Enrico Torre ed. El mapa lingüístico del noroccidente ibérico: contacto, variación y cambio. München, Germany: Lincom Europa, 39-57. (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2021. Lexical impacts of words’ history of occurrence in fast speech: Word and segment shortening in Spanish. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 19.1 (Co-authors: William D. Raymond, Earl K. Brown, Rich File-Muriel) 

  • 2021. O infinitivo flexionado en galego: unha análise variacionista baseada na lingua oral. Estudos de Lingüística Galega, 13. (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2019. Bringing purported black sheep into the fold: Galician inflected infinitives and Spanish pre-infinitival nominative subjects. Languages, 40.2. (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2018. “Cumulative exposure to phonetic reducing environments marks the lexicon: Spanish /d-/ words spoken in isolation”. Functionalist and Usage-based Approaches to the Study of Language: In honor of Joan L. Bybee. John Benjamins. 192, 127. 

  • 2018. Variable subject pronominal expression in non-finite clauses: Implications for variant patterns and emergent contexts. Lingua, 215, 27-39. (Co-authors: Javier Rivas, Mayra Cortés-Torres) 

  • 2018. “Cumulative exposure to phonetic reducing environments marks the lexicon: Spanish /d-/ words spoken in isolation”. Functionalist and Usage-based Approaches to the Study of Language: In honor of Joan L. Bybee. John Benjamins. 192, 127. 

  • 2018. “Usage-based approaches to Spanish Linguistics”. Handbook of Spanish Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. 

  • 2016. Cumulative context effects and variant lexical representations: Word use and English final t/d deletion. Language Variation and Change 28, 175–202. (Co-authors: William D. Raymond, Alice Healy) 

  • 2015. Fine-grained and probabilistic crosslinguistic influence in the pronunciation of cognates: Evidence from corpus-based spontaneous conversation and experimentally elicited data. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 8, 59-83. 2   (Co-author: Mark Amengual) 

  • 2015. The role of discourse context frequency in phonological variation: A usage-based approach to bilingual speech production. International Journal of Bilingualism 19, 387-406.  

  • 2013.Word Classes in Studies of Phonological Variation: Conditioning Factors or Epiphenomena? Selected Proceedings of the 15th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Ed. by Chad Howe, Sarah Blackwell & Margaret Lubbers Quesada. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 179-186. 

  • 2013. Concordancia variable con haber en español puertorriqueño. Boletín de Lingüística 24, 102-118. (Co-author: Javier Rivas). 

  • 2013. “Puerto Rican Intensifiers: ¡bien/muy variables!” Selected Proceedings for the 6th International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (Co-author: Mayra Cortés-Torres). Ed. by Ana M. Carvalho & Sara Beaudrie. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 11-19. 

  • 2012. Grammatical Relation Probability: How Usage-patterns Shape AnalogyLanguage Variation and Change 24, 317–341. (Co-author: Javier Rivas)  

  • 2012. How Discourse Context Shapes the Lexicon: Explaining the Distribution of Spanish f- / h- wordsDiachronica, 29.2, 139–161. (Co-author: William D. Raymond) 

  • 2012. Stage-level and Individual-level Distinction in Morphological VariationBorealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 1,2. 72–89. (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2012. “Are Effects of Word Frequency Effects of Context of Use? An Analysis of Initial Fricative Reduction in Spanish” (Co-author: William D. Raymond). Frequency Effects in Language. Vol 2: Learning and Processing. Ed. by Stefan Th. Gries & Dagmar S. Divjak. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. 35–52.  

  • 2012.  “Syllable-final and Syllable-initial /s/ Reduction in Cali, Colombia: One Variable or Two?” (Co-author: Earl Brown). Linguistic Studies in Colombian Varieties of Spanish. Ed. by Richard File-Muriel & Rafael Orozco. Madrid: Iberoamericana. 89–106. 

  • 2012. “Syntactic and pragmatic usage of the [estar + adjective] construction in Puerto Rican Spanish: ¡Está brutal!”. (Co-author: Mayra Cortés-Torres). Selected Proceedings of the 2010 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium.Ed. by Kimberly Geeslin & Manuel Díaz-Campos. Somerville, MA. 

  • 2011. Correlaciones entre forma y función en las construcciones interrogativas parciales del español de Puerto Rico / Form ~ function correlations in WH-interrogative constructions in Puerto Rican Spanish. Estudios de Lingüística de la Universidad de Alicante 25, 289–315. (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2011. Subject ~ Verb word-order in Spanish Interrogatives: A Quantitative Analysis of Puerto Rican SpanishSpanish in Context 8.1, 23–49. (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2010. “Variable Development of Intersubjectivity in Spanish”. (Co-author: Javier Rivas). A Mosaic of Corpus Linguistics. Selected Approaches. Ed. by Aquilino Sánchez & Moisés Almela. Frankfurt/Berlin: Peter Lang Frankfurt. 61–78. 

  • 2010. Las interrogativas hendidas en español: ¿cómo es que se usan? Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 29.2,75–95.  (Co-author: Javier Rivas) 

  • 2009. Phonological Evidence of Crosslinguistic Exemplar Connections. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 2.2, 257–274. (secondary author: David Harper) 

  • 2006. The Velarization of Labial, Coda Stops in Spanish: A Frequency Account. Revista de Lingüística Teórica y Aplicada, 44.2, 47–58. 

  • 2005. Syllable-initial /s/ in Traditional New Mexican Spanish: Linguistic Factors Favoring Reduction ‘ahina’. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 24, 1–2, 13–30. 

  • 2005. New Mexican Spanish: Insight into the Variable Reduction of 'la ehe inihial' (/s-/). Hispania 88.4. 813–824. 

  • 2003. “Spanish /s/: A Different Story from Beginning (initial) to End (final)”. (Co-author: Rena Torres Cacoullos). A Romance Perspective in Language Knowledge and  

     

 

Books