Esther L. Brown
List of John Benjamins publications for which Esther L. Brown plays a role.
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
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
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
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