Kansas State University

Dr. Earl Brown

Assistant Professor of Spanish ekbrown@ksu.edu Eisenhower Hall 108, (785) 532-1923

Teaching

Dr. Brown has taught: intro to Spanish linguistics, Spanish phonetics and phonology, advanced Spanish grammar, intermediate Spanish grammar, intro to Spanish-English translation, the history of the Spanish language, Spanish writing and conversation, Senior Thesis for Spanish majors, Spanish for Heritage Speakers, and Spanish language courses. He enjoys working with students of various linguistic backgrounds and strives to take advantage of and build upon the strengths of all students, whether they are native- or heritage-speakers of Spanish or second-language learners. Watch a three-minute video of Dr. Brown teaching and commenting on his Spanish phonetics and phonology course at a previous institution.

Research

Dr. Brown's research centers on language variation and change in Spanish, especially its sound system. In most of this research he employs the phonetics software Praat (praat.org) and uses corpus linguistics techniques of text manipulation and searching with the programming language and environment R (r-project.org). Additionally, Dr. Brown has recently created a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews of native speakers of Mexican Spanish living in Salinas, California: the Corpus of Mexican Spanish in Salinas, California.

Recent publications

Brown, Earl K. and Esther L. Brown. 2012. "Syllable-final and Syllable-initial /s/ Reduction in Cali, Colombia: One Variable or Two?" In Colombian Varieties of Spanish, ed. by Richard File-Muriel and Rafael Orozco. Madrid: Iberoamericana.

File-Muriel, Richard, and Earl K. Brown. 2011. "The Gradient Nature of s-Lenition in Caleño Spanish." Language Variation and Change 23: 223–243.

Brown, Earl K. 2011. "Paradigmatic Peer-Pressure: Word-Medial, Syllable-Initial /s/ Lenition in Dominican Spanish." In Selected Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology, ed. by Scott M. Alvord, 46–58. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Brown, Earl K. 2009. A Usage-Based Account of Syllable- and Word-Final /s/ Reduction in Four Dialects of Spanish. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Education

PhD, Hispanic Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2008
MA, Spanish Linguistics, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 2003
BA, Spanish, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 2001