EstherBrown

  • Professor
  • Department Chair
  • SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE
Office Hours

Fall 2026 Office Hours: Tuesday 12:30-1:30pm

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 Theory19.1 (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.Language Variation and Change 28, 175–202.(Co-authors: William D. Raymond, Alice Healy)
  • 2015.Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 8, 59-83. 2 (Co-author: Mark Amengual)
  • 2015.International Journal of Bilingualism 19, 387-406.
  • 2013.Word Classes in Studies of Phonological Variation: Conditioning Factors or Epiphenomena?. 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 Lingüística24, 102-118. (Co-author: Javier Rivas).
  • 2013. “Puerto Rican Intensifiers: ¡bien/muy variables!”(Co-author: Mayra Cortés-Torres). Ed. by Ana M. Carvalho & Sara Beaudrie. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 11-19.
  • 2012..Language Variation and Change24, 317–341. (Co-author: Javier Rivas)
  • 2012..Diachronica, 29.2, 139–161. (Co-author: William D. Raymond)
  • 2012..Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics1,2. 72–89. (Co-author: Javier Rivas)
  • 2012.(Co-author: William D. Raymond).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)..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 Alicante25, 289–315. (Co-author: Javier Rivas)
  • 2011..Spanish in Context8.1, 23–49. (Co-author: Javier Rivas)
  • 2010. “Variable Development of Intersubjectivity in Spanish”. (Co-author: Javier Rivas).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 Linguistics2.2, 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-/).Hispania88.4. 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 andUse