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As a historical sociolinguists working on the history of Spanish, and as a language and linguistics instructor, my research has focused on the following areas:
The ecology of language and dialect contact in the history of Spanish
The same as other European languages, Spanish has spread beyond Europe, first as a consequence of colonialism, and more recently as one of several major 'world' languages. In this process, contact among ethnolinguistically diverse populations has shaped the broad array of repertoires that we today classify as forms of the language. As a historical sociolinguist, I am interested in approaching this process as the result of communication and learning among individual speakers, as advocated for by ecological approaches to language. Two examples of my work in this area are my book Spanish as a Contact Language: An Ecological History (EUP, 2025) and a study of the progression of sibilant mergers in early colonial Spanish (Transactions of the Philological Society, 2019)
Language acquisition as a factor in language change
For decades, researchers have observed the links between acquisition processes in many social environments and language change, as in the effects of non-native learning or child acquisition on the emergence of new language varieties. As a historical sociolinguist, I am interested in applying this rationale to historical data, which I have studied from an acquisitional perspective in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial Spanish. Some examples of my work in this area are my edited volume Lifespan Acquisition and Language Change: Historical Sociolinguistic Perspectives (John Benjamins, 2024), and a study on the emergence of a new 2nd-person address form in 19th-20th century Río de la Plata Spanish (co-authored with Irene Moyna) (Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2023)
The history of Spanish in the United States: New Mexico
Overlapping with the previous two themes, and stemming from my dissertation on the history of Spanish in New Mexico, I have explored various aspects of the evolution of Spanish in what is today the southwest of the United States. In my research, I use archival corpora to study how speakers selected linguistic features and create norms that reflect the local environmental conditions of communication in New Mexico, from the colonial period up to early statehood in the early 1900s. Work in this area includes, among other products, a study of the effects of dialect contact in early colonial New Mexican Spanish (Diachronica, 2013) and an analysis of English-Spanish contact features in post-1848 New Mexican personal correspondence (Spanish in Context, 2014).
The teaching of linguistics and of Spanish
As language and linguistics faculty, I feel privileged to be able to spend a big part of my time with undergraduate and graduate students in our WCU Linguistics and Spanish programs. My overall goal is to encourage my students to think of themselves as emerging language speakers and as language experts with a critical eye for how language variation and attitudes mediate our everyday experience. In this spirit, I am interested in applications of theory and technology to the teaching of language and linguistics. Work in this area includes my co-edited volume Online Language Teaching Research (Oregon State University Press, 2017) (co-edited with Regina Morin and Susana Rivera-Mills) and a paper on the potential for linguistics courses to help students develop critical language awareness (co-authored with Laura Verrekia).
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