Esther L. Brown

• PhD Hispanic Linguistics
• University of Colorado Boulder

This volume features the latest advancements in Spanish sociolinguistics, drawing from the 10th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS10). Organized into three sections, its nine chapters explore crucial issues in bilingualism and sociolinguistic variation (morpho-syntactic, phonetic, phonological and lexical/pragmatic) within the Spanish-speaki...

We examine variable first-person singular subject pronoun expression in Spanish learner data to investigate the effects of study abroad in Mexico and Spain on the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. In addition to exploring pre- and post-study abroad effects, this work considers whether such impacts wane over time after the study abroad exper...

Compared to neighboring Romance languages, Galician currently maintains a more ubiquitous usage of the construction [haber (present) + (de) + infinitive] as a future marker in variation with the periphrastic construction with ir ‘go’ and the morphological future. We examine this under-studied construction to gain a better understanding of Galician...

Using naturally occurring data from Spanish from Madrid, this study is the first to analyze durations of the Spanish word decir ‘to say, to tell’ both as a verb with prepositional meaning and as part of the reformulating construction [es decir] ‘that is to say’ (N = 388). We show that, although it is neither highly grammaticalized nor frequent, [es...

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular discour...

O presente traballo ofrece os resultados da primeira análise variacionista do infinitivo flexionado en galego no contexto das cláusulas adverbiais co obxectivo de identificar a gramática probabilística da dita construción, en contraposición ao infinitivo invariable e ao subxuntivo. Os resultados suxiren que os patróns de uso do infinitivo flexionad...

Variability abounds in speech. According to usage-based accounts, lexical representations reflect phonetic variants of words resulting from contextual conditioning. Because faster speech contexts promote durational shortening of words and segments, words that occur more often in fast speech may be more reduced than words commonly used in slow speec...

This work reports the results of quantitative, variationist analyses of two typologically unusual constructions in order to explore the grammatical conditioning of subject expression in non-finite clauses. Both constructions, Galician inflected infinitives and (Puerto Rican) Spanish preposed, nominative infinitival subjects, have not been widely st...

This work presents the first large-scale analysis of the typologically and dialectally unusual appearance of variable pronominal subjects in non-finite clauses. A comparative variationist analysis of 703 Spanish adverbial purpose clauses (both finite and non-finite) reveals that, despite a significant difference in rates of pronoun expression acros...

The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin August 2018

Cambridge Core - Latin American Studies - The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics - edited by Kimberly L. Geeslin

The contributions to this volume honor Joan Bybee’s 2005 LSA Presidential address “Grammar is Usage and Usage is Grammar,” as a cumulative articulation of Professor Bybee's long and influential career in linguistics. The volume begins with a functional examination of child language acquisition of ergative languages. The next three contributions suc...

Word production variability is widespread in speech, and rates of variant production correlate with many factors. Recent research suggests mental representation of both canonical word forms and distinct reduced variants, and that production and processing are sensitive to variant frequency. What factors lead to frequency-weighted variant representa...

Word pronunciation variability is widespread in speech and much of the variation can be explained as the consequence of approximation, overlap, or assimilation of articulatory gestures in the speech stream. Because words are produced in constantly changing discourse contexts and with different speech parameters, pronunciation variants co-occur prob...

The present study examines variable realizations of Spanish word-initial voiced and voiceless dental stops in Spanish-English cognate pairs. Employing a variationist approach to naturalistic data, we report significantly decreased likelihood of reduced articulations of word-initial /d/ in cognates in spontaneous bilingual Puerto Rican discourse, an...

Missing from the body of literature on contact-induced phonological influence are studies that examine language variation as it occurs in speech production among members of a speech community. This study uses a corpus of naturally occurring Spanish/English code-switched discourse to determine whether cross-language phonological effects are evident...

This work examines the role of the stage-level (SL)/individual-level (IL) distinction applied to nouns in a case of morphosyntactic regularization in Spanish: variable reanalysis of the NP argument as subject in the presentational haber construction (había/habían perros). We conduct variationist, quantitative analyses on all instances of existentia...

It has been argued speakers' knowledge of the probabilities of certain phones, words, and syntactic structures affects language production (Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Tily, Gahl, Arnon, Snider, Kothari, & Bresnan, 2009). This study provides evidence for effects of grammatical relation probabilities by identifying significant...

The connection between frequency of form use and form reduction in language has been widely studied. After controlling for multiple contextual factors associated with reduction, word frequency, which reflects a speaker’s cumulative experience with a word, has been reported to predict several types of pronunciation reduction. However, word frequency...

Using a corpus of Medieval Spanish text, we examine factors affecting the Modern Standard Spanish outcome of the initial /f/ in Latin FV‑ words. Regression analyses reveal that the frequency of a word’s use in extralexical phonetic reducing environments and lexical stress patterns significantly predict the modern distribution of f‑ ([f]) and h‑ (Ø)...

In spanish, the impersonal-existential construction with haber (hubo fiestas) is in syntactic variation with the intransitive-existential construction in which haber agrees in person and number with its sole argument (hubieron fiestas). Using a corpus of 370,000 words of spoken Puerto Rican spanish, we conduct a variable rule analysis on all instan...

Previous studies on Spanish interrogative constructions, which focus primarily on the di versity of constructions and their multiple communicative functions, do not sustain the view of an isomorphic relationship between (interrogative) form and (information sought) function as proposed in traditional grammars. In this study, through a frequency bas...

We conduct a quantitative analysis of conversational speech from native speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish to test whether optional non-inversion of subjects in wh -questions ( ¿qué tú piensas? ) is indicative of a movement in Spanish from flexible to rigid word order (Morales 1989; Toribio 2000). We find high rates of subject expression (51%) and a...

This paper offers a usage-based approach to Spanish cleft interrogatives, which have received very little attention in the literature. By means of variationist methodology we examine 500 direct wh- questions in a corpus of casual Puerto Rican Spanish conversation. We detail the morphosyntactic characteristics of these constructions, and, through a...

We conduct quantitative analyses of 5,569 tokens of Spanish word-final /s/ in the speech of Spanish/English bilinguals and monolinguals to test the Exemplar Model of Lexical Representation. We establish that reduction (aspiration, deletion) of word-final /s/ in the speech of New Mexico is significantly lower in Spanish words whose English translati...

In several varieties of spoken Spanish, word-medial, labial stops are articulated as velar stops (pepsi > Pe[k]si). This work summarizes some previous attempts to explain this abrupt sound substitution. Then, building upon advances in phonotactic theory (e.g., Pierrehumbert, 1994) and patterns emergent from lexical representations (Bybee, 2001), th...

In several varieties of spoken Spanish, word-medial, labial stops are articulated as velar stops (pepsi > Pe[k]si). This work summarizes some previous attempts to explain this abrupt sound substitution. Then, building upon advances in phonotactic theory (e.g., Pierrehumbert, 1994) and patterns emergent from lexical representations (Bybee, 2001), th...

For close to a century, a noted feature of the Spanish of New Mexico has been the variable aspiration and deletion of syllable-initial /s/ (Espinosa 1909), yet no empirical investigations have been undertaken to study this process within this variety of Spanish in the United States. In fact, syllable-initial /s/ world-wide is rerely quantified, wit...

Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to co...