Rate My Professor Javier Rivas

Professor Javier Rivas serves as Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 2003. Rivas's academic interests center on usage-based grammar, discourse syntax, language variation and change, grammaticalization, functional syntax, Hispanic linguistics, and Galician linguistics. He applies a usage-based perspective to investigate Spanish phonology and morphosyntax, exploring phenomena such as variable subject pronoun expression, inflected infinitives, and discourse markers.

Throughout his career, Rivas has produced a prolific body of scholarly work, including over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Recent publications encompass the co-authored textbook Principios de lingüística hispánica (2025, with Gabriel Rei-Doval), "Testing cumulative lexicalized effects in study abroad" (Languages, 2025, with Esther L. Brown and Tracy Quan), "Does increased grammaticalization yield decreased duration? Testing vamos a variants in Spanish" (2025, in Spanish sociolinguistics in the 21st century), "Constructional sources of durational shortening in discourse markers" (Linguistics, 2024, with Esther L. Brown), "Variant choices of future time reference in Galician" (Languages, 2024, with Esther L. Brown), "The future of usage-based approaches" (2023, in The Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics), and "Ser, estar y los verbos semicopulativos" (2023, in The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Syntax). Earlier works include "Verb-object compounds with Spanish dar ‘give’" (WORD, 2016), "Null direct objects in Spanish conversation" (Hispanic Research Journal, 2015), and "Grammatical relation probability" (Language Variation and Change, 2012, with Esther L. Brown). Additionally, he co-edited a special issue of Languages titled "Revisiting language variation and change" (2021, with Esther L. Brown). His contributions have shaped discussions on quantitative variationist analyses in Ibero-Romance languages.