Esther L. Brown

List of John Benjamins publications in which Esther L. Brown is involved.

Articles (5) | Order by:

Rivas, Javier and Esther L. Brown 2025 Chapter 6. Does increased grammaticalization yield decreased duration? Testing vamos a variants in Spanish Spanish Sociolinguistics in the 21st Century: Current trends and methodologies, Montes-Alcalá, Cecilia and Miguel García (eds.), pp. 131–147 | Chapter

This study employed naturalistic data to provide a descriptive overview of the patterns of reduction in the Spanish [ir (present) a + infinitive] construction (the default future marker). A durational analysis of N = 158 tokens of vamos (‘we go’) confirms faster rates of articulation across the… read more

Brown, Esther L. 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, Smith, K. Aaron and Dawn Nordquist (eds.), pp. 127–153 | Chapter

Reduced pronunciation variants of words commonly arise in discourse contexts promoting lenition. Words differ in their likelihood of occurrence in reducing contexts. We test whether words’ cumulative exposure to reducing environments significantly predicts phonological reduction in experimentally… read more

Brown, Esther L. and William D. Raymond 2012 How discourse context shapes the lexicon: Explaining the distribution of Spanish f-/h‑ words Diachronica 29:2, pp. 139–161 | Article

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… read more

Brown, Esther L. and Javier Rivas 2011 Subject-verb word order in Spanish interrogatives: A quantitative analysis of Puerto Rican Spanish Spanish in Context 8:1, pp. 23–49 | Article

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… read more

Brown, Esther L. and Rena Torres Cacoullos 2003

Spanish /s/:

A different story from beginning (initial) to end (final)

A Romance Perspective on Language Knowledge and Use: Selected papers from the 31st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Chicago, 19–22 April 2001, Núñez-Cedeño, Rafael, Luis López and Richard Cameron (eds.), pp. 21–38 | Article