Esther L. Brown

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

Articles

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‑ wordsDiachronica 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
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