Javier Rivas

Javier Rivas is a Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado. His research focuses on usage-based grammar, discourse syntax, language variation and change, Hispanic linguistics, and Galician linguistics. He has collaborated extensively with co-authors like Esther L. Brown on projects analyzing syntactic patterns in Spanish and Galician dialects through corpus-based approaches.

His work examines phenomena such as inflected infinitives in Galician, tense usage in Costa Rican Spanish, and the role of discourse markers in grammaticalization processes. Rivas has edited special journal issues and contributed to encyclopedic works on Hispanic linguistics. His research frequently integrates quantitative methodologies to explore morphosyntactic variation and functional motivations for syntactic structures.

Publications span journals like Lingua, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and Language Variation and Change, reflecting his engagement with both theoretical frameworks and empirical data. His scholarship bridges functional-typological and variationist approaches, emphasizing the role of language use in shaping grammatical systems.