Jessi Elana Aaron

Jessi Elana Aaron is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Florida, affiliated with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She holds an interdisciplinary background with a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics (University of New Mexico, 2006), two MAs (in Anthropology and Latin American Studies), and a BA in Political Science and Spanish (Stanford University, 1999). Her research focuses on sociolinguistics, language variation, grammaticalization, and historical morphosyntax, with additional interests in gender and disability studies.

Education

• PhD, Spanish and Portuguese (Hispanic Linguistics), University of New Mexico (2006)
• MA, Anthropology (Ethnology), University of New Mexico (2002)
• MA, Latin American Studies, Stanford University (2000)
• BA, Political Science and Spanish, Stanford University (1999)

Research Interests

Dr. Aaron’s work bridges sociolinguistics and cognitive science, examining language change through usage-based models. Her studies include:

• Analysis of Spanish morphosyntactic variation in historical and cross-linguistic contexts
• Gender dynamics and disability terminology in language
• Lexical borrowing patterns in Spanish-English contact zones
• Grammaticalization processes in Iberian and New Mexican Spanish dialects

Publications

Her articles appear in Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, and Journal of English Linguistics. Recent work explores transitivity, epistemic future expressions, and semantic prosody in disability-related lexemes. She has conducted fieldwork in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico.

Affiliations

Adjunct faculty in Linguistics, and affiliate of the Center for Latin American Studies and Center for European Studies at UF.