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The way language shapes perceptions about disability is a complex and long-debated topic within popular disability discourse. With the rise of “person-first” language in recent decades, this debate has shifted toward a grammatical, rather than lexical one, contrasting forms such as people with disabilities, disabled people, and the disabled. While these different construction types—prepositional, attributive, and nominalized, respectively—refer to the same entity, the purported connotations of each have been highly contested. Despite this, research on the topic has been limited and mixed, particularly for studies focusing on actual usage. By analyzing these constructions in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study identifies factors contributing to the variable usage of each construction type, including disability type, referent age, and text genre. The results show that usage varies significantly between constructions using disability modifiers and those using non- disability ones (e.g., mentally ill versus powerful), as well as between different disability types (e.g., mentally ill versus epileptic). This varies further depending on whether the referent is a child or an adult. In addition, in formal contexts, prepositional labels are more likely to be used than nominalized ones. While, overall, this variability was relatively stable for nominalized constructions between 1990 and 2019, prepositional usage has increased over this period. By demonstrating how construction usage is context-dependent—sometimes in ways that challenge popular expectations—this study highlights the importance of usage- based, sociolinguistic research in the analysis of disability labeling constructions and the types of social meanings they index.

This dissertation investigates a widely observed phenomenon in child language acquisition: overregularization, which occurs when a child applies a regular linguistic pattern where an irregular form is expected (Bybee, 2015), for example, when a child overregularizes irregular 1sg Spanish sé ‘I know’ as sabo. This dissertation adds to the research on the overregularization of Spanish verbal morphology. The population of focus is Spanish-speaking children ranging from the ages of 1;10 – 12;4 with different language backgrounds (e.g., monolingual Spanish children, U.S. child heritage speakers). The studies included address the development of two Spanish morphological forms by focusing on children’s production of second person singular preterit verbs (e.g., dijiste ‘(you) said’) and irregular past participles (e.g., dicho ‘said’). How will children from different language backgrounds overregularize the structures of interest? The results will shed light on children’s acquisition of the two morphological structures, highlighting similarities or differences therein.

American Sign Language (ASL), like many different signed languages, has a systematic way of using pointing signs for multiple types of nominal reference. Possibly the most basic function of pointing is to indicate, direct and modulate reference to physical objects located in proximal and distal areas called exophoric demonstratives. This study aims to investigate ASL exophoric demonstratives and how ASL fits within the different typological systems of demonstratives that have been documented (Diessel & Coventry, 2020). Several research questions focus on how signers direct attention to proximal and distal referents in ASL using an elicitation task. The two studies (adult and children) recorded a combined 866 demonstrative tokens and suggest that ASL has a one-demonstrative system using a pointing sign as the primary demonstrative. However, the primary ASL demonstrative is modulated with variation in handshape, movement, and eye gaze to signal the location of the referent.

In everyday communication, speakers go beyond words to synchronize speech sounds and gestures, adding nuanced meanings. For instance, in Colombian Spanish, recounting the distant past involves elongating words, modulating pitch, and using expressive hand movements. This dissertation explores this phenomenon, termed Multimodal Iconic Expressions (MMIEs), using Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar. The quantitative study uncovers correlations between verb aspect, nominal quantification, and speech duration, revealing phono-iconic connections. The qualitative study examines construal operations giving rise to MMIEs across semantic domains. MMIEs predominantly appear in discourse Focus, with durative events and mass-like quantities exhibiting pronounced phono-iconic associations. Patterns include stress and beat-like gestures, while more elaborate expressions involve pitch, intensity, duration, and voice-type modulations, elevating iconicity levels. This research advances our understanding of iconicity in language, emphasizing profound conceptual meanings encoded in phonological elements. This research extends the boundaries of our understanding of iconicity in conceptualization and language use, underscoring the capacity of phonological elements to carry profound conceptual meaning.

Spanish in New Mexico prior to the 1900s was the predominant language of the region that began to be displaced with the growth of the English-speaking population during the 20th century. In this dissertation I refer to the Spanish language variety that has had the longest historical presence in northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado as Traditional New Mexican Spanish (TNMS, as per Bills & Vigil, 2008). This study aims to document aspects of maintenance and change regarding TNMS. The traditional heritage variety of New Mexican Spanish is changing in many ways, evolving from what has been documented in the early pioneering studies in the Spanish language of New Mexico by Aurelio Espinoza (1911). This dissertation collects linguistic evidence of lexical merging that would indicate that Traditional New Mexican Spanish continues to undergo a process of change through dialectal leveling as its speakers interact with speakers of other dialects.

The extent to which /s/ reduces in both onset and coda positions varies greatly across Spanish varieties, with Traditional New Mexican Spanish showing significant reduction rates in past research. However, to-date there has been no in-depth linguistic study of Spanish in Cíbola County. The current work presents an analysis of variable /s/ reduction in Cíbola Spanish, using data from the New Mexico-Colorado Spanish Survey. The results demonstrate that reduction in this dialect is conditioned primarily by linguistic rather than extralinguistic factors, which vary based on syllable position. The manuscript also briefly introduces the history of Cíbola, Hispanic identity & language attitudes, and proposes the beneficial application of a joint usage-based and translanguaging theory to the study of bilingual speech data. This thesis sets the stage for a more comprehensive sociolinguistic and ethnographic analysis of Cíbola, laying the groundwork for the creation of a sociolinguistic corpus of the languages spoken there.

Previous work on language change in contact situations has treated lexical borrowing and grammatical borrowing as discrete phenomena (Appel and Muysken 1987, Thomason 2001, Campbell 2013). Claims that lexical borrowing needs to occur before grammatical borrowing (e.g. Thomason and Kaufmann 1988) or that grammar can be borrowed without any lexicon (e.g. Aikhenvald 2002) are often mentioned in the literature. This dissertation explores the interplay between grammatical constructions (in the sense of Goldberg 2006) and lexical elements in intense contact situations. More specifically, it addresses the following research question: Are grammatical constructions borrowed independently from the elements contained in said constructions? To answer this question, the present research project analyzes the influence of Spanish on Paraguayan Guaraní, both languages spoken in South America, which have been in intense contact for five centuries. The research question is addressed via three empirical studies using a 40-hour corpus of sociolinguistic interviews (Labov 2001). The first study focuses on the motivations to borrow verbs and the effects that the adopted elements have in the internal organization of the recipient language (see, for instance, Haspelmath 2009). The main finding of this study is that loan verbs coexist with their native-origin counterparts in part because they occur in different grammatical constructions. The second study explores differential object marking, and the factors that favor the occurrence of -pe, a human direct object marker. Results show that younger, more Spanish-dominant speakers, have a higher usage rate of the feature, and that -pe suffixes to loans more frequently than to native-origin nouns. The third study compares the behavior of the polysemous verbal prefix je- among loan verbs and among native-origin verbs. It was found that the primary function of je- is as middle-marker (MM). Even more s

This study of the distribution and function of Historical Present (HP) in Old French, Old English, and Old Norse narratives combines the methods of cognitive linguistics and corpus-based discourse analysis with insights from work in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and medieval studies. I show that HP, in combination with those other features, is a strategy to establish stance, a strategy that both constructs and reinforces a cultural persona. Although previous research on HP in narratives focused on the use of HP to foreground events and contrast marked vs unmarked events in narratives, my analysis shows that HP has an additional range of expressive purposes that are associated with situating the narrator and establishing a stance towards the audience and the events and characters portrayed. The stance associated with HP varies according to its combination with other features. This combination can be thought of as a meta-construction, and I argue that the definition of ‘construction’ may be expanded and applied to include narrative structure as a whole. The narrative as a meta-construction then evokes an entire speech community frame or culture, suggesting that the speech community as a whole constructs a meta-persona through its familiar, institutionalized narratives, in much the same way that Eckert (2008) and 3rd wave variationists show that language use centers on speakers constructing personas.

This study examines phonological and morphological features involved in the release of plural marking –s in nominal phrases of Spanish as a second language (L2). The linguistic variety belongs to Spanish spoken by members of the Ngäbe pueblo of Panama. Despite the preference of final /s/ deletion in Panamanian Spanish, morphology seems to activate the production of plural marking –s in certain nominal phrases. Meanwhile, other circumstances stimulating the application of alternative strategies for plural marks are detected. This study also includes questions about the influence of the first language (L1), particularly by comparing Ngäbere and Spanish nominal phrases. It searches to find the origins of plural –s deletion in the substratum of L1 or in the particular scenario of phonological /s/ deletion in Caribbean Spanish.

Research on variable subject expression in null subject languages is robust; however, the factors that condition subject expression in English are underexplored, primarily because it is generally assumed that overt subjects accompany inflected verbs. This dissertation addresses this gap by investigating cross-linguistic constraints that influence subject (un)expression in English, focusing on third person human and inanimate referents. Data for this study come from two discursive corpora, representing the genres of conversation and narrative. Analysis reveals that discourse/pragmatic factors, such as accessibility, are operative notwithstanding the typological divide commonly known as pro/non-pro-drop. This dissertation presents an original approach to measuring discourse connectedness, finding that variable subject expression follows a gradient scale of prosodic cohesion. Moreover, the constraints on third person are found to vastly differ according to animacy and referentiality, indicating that with regards to subject expression, third person in English is not a coherent category. Finally, particular collocations frequently occurring with null subjects are analyzed vis-à-vis paths of grammaticalization.