Marisa Brook

Lecturer in Sociolinguistics
Language and Linguistics
University of Essex

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Peer-reviewed journal articles


accepted

Marisa Brook. Obsolescence and abortive changes in variationist approaches to language change. Language and Linguistics Compass.

accepted

Marisa Brook. Pretend like in American English: When a complementizer branches out. American Speech.

in press

Naomi Nagy and Marisa Brook. Constraints on speech rate: A heritage-language perspective. International Journal of Bilingualism.

2023     [link]

Marisa Brook and Emily Blamire. Language play is language variation: Quantitative evidence and what it implies about language change. Language, 99(3), 491-530.

2023     [link]

Marisa Brook. As if and as though in Canadian English: Register and the onset of change. English World-Wide, 44(3), 381-402.

2023     [link]

Marisa Brook and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Subject relative who in Ontario, Canada: Change from above in a transplanted ecology. Journal of Linguistic Geography, 11(1), 25-37.

2021     [link]

Matt Hunt Gardner, Derek Denis, Marisa Brook, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Be like and the Constant Rate Effect: From the bottom to the top of the S-curve. English Language and Linguistics, 25(2), 281-324.

2020     [link]

Marisa Brook. I feel like and it feels like: Two paths to the emergence of epistemic markers. Linguistics Vanguard, 6(1).

2019     [link]

Derek Denis, Matt Hunt Gardner, Marisa Brook, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Peaks and arrowheads of vernacular reorganization. Language Variation and Change, 31(1), 43-67.

2018     [link]

Marisa Brook. Taking it up a level: Copy-raising and cascaded tiers of morphosyntactic change. Language Variation and Change, 30(2), 231-260.

2018     [link]

Marisa Brook, Bridget L. Jankowski, Lex Konnelly, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. 'I don't come off as timid anymore': Real-time change in early adulthood against the backdrop of the community. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22(4), 351-374.

2017     [pdf]

Marisa Brook. Interactive name databases as an introduction to social factors and graph interpretation. American Speech, 92(2), 264-278.

2016     [pdf]

Marisa Brook and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Why does North American English use try to but British English use try and? Let's try and/to figure it out. American Speech, 91(3), 301-326.


Book chapters


in press

Marisa Brook. Canadian English grammar. In Kingsley Bolton (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes. Wiley-Blackwell.

2024     [link]

Marisa Brook. Sociolinguistics in Canada. In Martin J. Ball and Rajend Mesthrie (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World (second edition), 28-38. Routledge.

2023     [link]

Marisa Brook and Keir Moulton. Locating the locative in English pseudo-locative where-relatives. In Łukasz Jędrzejowski and Carla Umbach (eds.), Non-interrogative subordinate WH-clauses (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics), 438-460. Oxford University Press.


Conference proceedings


2021     [pdf]

Marisa Brook and Keir Moulton. English pseudo-locative relatives with resumptives: Two acceptability studies. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 56, 51-65.

2017     [pdf]

Marisa Brook. A two-tiered change in Canadian English: The emergence of a streamlined evidential system. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 23(2), Article 7.

2014     [pdf]

Marisa Brook. Comparative complementizers in Canadian English: Insights from early fiction. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 20(2), Article 2.

2011     [pdf]

Marisa Brook. One of those situations where a relative pronoun becomes a complementizer: A case of grammaticalization in progress...again. Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association.


Conference presentations and posters


2024

Marisa Brook. Untangling the diachrony of variable used to: How many directions of change? ADS Annual Meeting 2024 (New York, New York, USA – 4-9 January).

2023

Marisa Brook. Comparatives as relative-clause markers: When like licenses a gap. ADS Annual Meeting 2023 (Denver, Colorado, USA – 5-8 January 2023).

2022

Marisa Brook. Pretending it into existence: Syntactic change through the semantic-pragmatic back door. ADS Annual Meeting 2022 (online – 6-9 January 2022).

2021

Marisa Brook and Heike Pichler. Orthographic variation reflects constituency variation, am I right or amirite? Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change (DiPVaC) 5 (online – 14-16 December 2021).

Mirva Johnson and Marisa Brook. Language shift in a microcosm: Finnish-English bilingualism, contact, and substrate effects in Sointula, British Columbia. NWAV 49 (online – 19-24 October 2021).

Marisa Brook and Mirva Johnson. Substrate effects and diachrony: Back vowels during long-term language shift in a Finnish-Canadian enclave. LSA Annual Meeting 2021 (online – 7-10 January 2021).

2020

Emily Blamire and Marisa Brook. Very quick reversal: Rapid real-time change in Canadian English intensifiers. ADS Annual Meeting 2020 (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA – 2-5 January 2020).

2019

Emily Blamire, Marisa Brook, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Very surprising: A real-time analysis of Toronto intensifiers from 2016 through 2019. Change and Variation in Canada 11 (St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada – 14-15 May 2019).

2018

Marisa Brook. As if and as though in earlier spoken Canadian English: Register and the onset of change. NWAV 47 (New York, New York, USA – 18-21 October 2018).

Marisa Brook and Emily Blamire. The analysis of awesomeØ: Rule-governed nonstandardness at the edge of the grammar [poster]. NWAV 47 (New York, New York, USA – 18-21 October 2018).

Marisa Brook and Sali A. Tagliamonte. A woman who lives in the city has a sister that lives in a town: Subject relativizers in Canadian English. ICAME 39 (Tampere, Finland – 30 May-3 June 2018).

Marisa Brook and Emily Blamire. Constraints on awesomeØ: Rule-breaking and following at the edge of the standard grammar. Change and Variation in Canada 10 (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada – 4-5 May 2018).

Marisa Brook. Complementizer as if and as though in Canadian English: An enduring register effect? Cascadia Workshop in Sociolinguistics 3 (Portland, Oregon, USA – 13-14 April 2018).

Marisa Brook. Where the where things are: SKT constructions and the grammaticalization of pseudolocative where [poster]. LSA Annual Meeting 2018 (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA – 4-7 January 2018).

2017

Marisa Brook. I feel like and it feels like: Two paths to the emergence of epistemic markers. NWAV 46 (Madison, Wisconsin, USA – 2-5 November 2017).

Marisa Brook, Bridget Jankowski, Lex Konnelly, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Post-adolescent change in the individual: Early adulthood against the backdrop of the community. LSA Annual Meeting 2017 (Austin, Texas, USA – 5-8 January 2017).

2016

Marisa Brook. A two-tiered change in Canadian English: The emergence of a streamlined evidential system. NWAV 45 (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada – 3-6 November 2016).

Marisa Brook. This seems to be on the way out: Covariants of seem subordination in Canadian and British English. Change and Variation in Canada 9 (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada – 7-8 May 2016).

Sali A. Tagliamonte and Marisa Brook. Adaptive change in sociolinguistic typology: The case of relative who [poster]. LSA Annual Meeting 2016 (Washington, D.C., USA – 7-10 January 2016).

Matt Hunt Gardner, Derek Denis, Marisa Brook, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. From the bottom to the top of the S-curve: Be like and the Constant Rate Effect. LSA Annual Meeting 2016 (Washington, D.C., USA – 7-10 January 2016).

2015

Marisa Brook and Emily Blamire. Ness-less-ness: Zero-derived adjectival nominals in Internet forum data. NWAV 44 (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 22-25 October 2015).

Sali A. Tagliamonte and Marisa Brook. Let's try and/to figure this out! Using spoken vernacular corpora to inform explanation. ICAME 36 (Trier, Germany – 27-31 May 2015).

Marisa Brook. Syntactic categories informing variationist analysis: The case of English copy-raising. LSA Annual Meeting 2015 (Portland, Oregon, USA – 8-11 January 2015).

2014

Marisa Brook. A peripheral view of a change from above: Prestige forms over time in a medium-sized community. NWAV 43 (Chicago, Illinois, USA – 23-26 October 2014).

Marisa Brook. A peripheral view of a change from above: Prestige forms over time in a medium-sized community. Change and Variation in Canada 8 (Kingston, Ontario, Canada – 31 May and 1 June 2014).

2013

Marisa Brook. Comparative complementizers in Canadian English: Insights from early fiction. NWAV 42 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA – 17-20 October 2013).

Matt Hunt Gardner, Derek Denis, Marisa Brook, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. The new global flow of linguistic influence: Be like at the saturation point. NWAV 42 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA – 17-20 October 2013).

Marisa Brook. Intersecting phonotactic restrictions and their perceptual effects. 2013 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – 1-3 June 2013).

Matt Hunt Gardner, Derek Denis, Marisa Brook, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. "I'm like, 'It’s different in York'": Real-time and apparent-time quotative trends in Toronto, Canada – and York, England. Change and Variation in Canada 7 (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 4-5 May 2013).

Marisa Brook (2013). Effects of sonority and homorganicity on perception of biconsonantal onset clusters by speakers of English and Japanese. Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto Phonology Workshop (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada—15-17 March).

2012

Marisa Brook and Naomi Nagy. Speech-rate in two Toronto heritage languages. The Road Less Travelled (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 26-27 October 2012).

2011

Marisa Brook. One of those situations where a relative pronoun becomes a complementizer: A case of grammaticalization in progress...again. 2011 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada – 28-31 May 2011).

Marisa Brook. Looks like there's something interesting going on here. Change and Variation in Canada 5 (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – 14-15 May 2011).

2009

Marisa Brook. One of those situations where a relative pronoun becomes a complementizer. Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium 3 (Ithaca, New York, USA – 4-5 April 2009).


Invited talks, guest lectures, and workshops


2024

Marisa Brook (2024). 'A certain lilt': The past and present of Finnish and English in Sointula, British Columbia. Department of English, St. Mary’s University (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada – 22 March 2024).

Marisa Brook (2024). Relative-clause markers like and such as: Untangling a sociosyntactic puzzle. Language and Society Research Group, University of Oxford (Oxford, England, UK – 16 February 2024).

Marisa Brook (2024). Extravagance, norms, and gradience: What language play can tell us about language change. Department of Languages and Linguistics, University of Essex (Colchester, England, UK – 15 February 2024).

Marisa Brook (2024). Data organisation and descriptive statistics. LG595: Professional Development for Research Students, University of Essex (Colchester, England, UK – 10 February 2024).

2023

Marisa Brook (2023). Language play: Why linguistic rule-breaking is rule-governed. Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University (online – 20 April 2023).

Marisa Brook (2023). What language play tells us about language change. Department of Language and Linguistics Science, University of York (online – 4 April 2023).

Marisa Brook (2023). Explaining linguistic innovation: Unlocking the rule-governedness of rule breaking. Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, York University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 3 March 2023).

2022

Marisa Brook (2022). What is the relationship between language play and language variation and change? Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, University of Southampton (online – 20 June 2022).

Marisa Brook (2022). Language play and linguistic change: When rule-breaking is rule-governed. Keynote talk, Toronto Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (TULCON) 15 (online – 5-6 March 2022).

Marisa Brook (2022). English in Sointula: Tracing the dialectological history of a Finnish-Canadian enclave. Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia (online – 20 January 2022).

2021

Marisa Brook (2021). The role of gradience in morphosyntactic change: Implications for models of variation. Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics, Birkbeck University of London (online – 13 July 2021).

Marisa Brook (2021). Envelopes of variation and morphosyntactic change: Towards an integrated view. Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York (online – 24 March 2021).

2020

Marisa Brook (2020). Linguistic bias and linguistic discrimination. Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE), University of Toronto Chapter (online – 30 November 2020).

Marisa Brook (2020). Zooming in and out: Gradience and overlap in co-variation. Society of Linguistics Undergraduate Students (SLUGS), University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 12 February 2020).

Marisa Brook (2020). Internal layers and external forces in defining envelopes of variation. Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London (London, England, United Kingdom – 3 February 2020).

2019

Marisa Brook and Sali A. Tagliamonte (2019). City rels, country rels: Prestige and the urban-rural divide. Urban and Rural Language Research: Variation, Identity and Innovation (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 9-10 November 2019).

Marisa Brook and Keir Moulton (2019). Non-locative where-relatives. RelNomComp Workshop (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 19-20 June 2019).

Marisa Brook. Teenagers: Driving language change forward. REAL Institute/G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 7 March 2019).

Marisa Brook. Inside the envelope of variation: Is there internal structure? Department of Linguistics, Reed College (Portland, Oregon, USA – 1 March 2019).

2018

Marisa Brook. Chain reactions in morphosyntactic change: Towards a dynamic envelope of variation. School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Newcastle (Newcastle, England, United Kingdom – 13 June 2018).

2017

Marisa Brook. Language and ethnicity. Linguistics 495: Language Variation and Change, University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – 6 November 2017).

Marisa Brook. Language and gender. Linguistics 495: Language Variation and Change, University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – 12 October 2017).

Marisa Brook. Cascaded changes: The case of complementizer like in Canadian English. Linguistics Circle Colloquium Series, University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – 28 September 2017).

Marisa Brook. Language and social class. Linguistics 495: Language Variation and Change, University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada – 18 September 2017).

Marisa Brook. The ins and outs of corpus analysis. Workshop for Great Lakes Expo for Experimental and Formal Undergraduate Linguistics (GLEEFUL) (East Lansing, Michigan, USA – 22-23 April 2017).

2016

Marisa Brook. Seems like subordination: Morphosyntactic change on two levels and its implications for evidential expressions. Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium (East Lansing, Michigan, USA – 6 October 2016).

Marisa Brook. This seems to be on the way out: Covariants of seem subordination in Canadian and British English. Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester (online – 23 May 2016).

Marisa Brook. Clara's comparative complementizers: A case-study perspective amidst a two-level change in the community. Linguistics 1256: Advanced Language Variation II, University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 22 February 2016).

2015

Marisa Brook. Not so co-relative: The past and present of restrictive who and that in Toronto and Belleville, Ontario. Symposium of Graduate Research on Canadian English, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada – 18 November 2015).

Marisa Brook. Relatively distinct: Localized loss of prestige on the periphery of urban Canadian English. Linguistics 202: Canadian English, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada – 12 March 2015).

2014

Marisa Brook (2014). Comparative complementizers in Canadian English: Insights from early fiction. Linguistics 1256: Advanced Language Variation II, University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 13 March 2014).

2013

Matt Hunt Gardner, Derek Denis, Marisa Brook, and Sali A. Tagliamonte. Be like at the saturation point: What large-scale student research projects can discover. University of Toronto Society of Linguistics Undergraduates (SLUGS) (Toronto, Ontario, Canada – 21 November 2013).


Media appearances


2019     [link]

Francesca Gillett. Has Meghan’s accent changed since marrying Prince Harry? BBC, 17 February 2019.

2018

Kathy O'Reilly. Linguists study Finnish, English language influences. North Island Eagle, 2(23), 20 July 2018.

             [link]

Christine Ro. How Americans preserved British English. BBC, 8 February 2018.

2016     [link]

Marisa Brook and Christine Ro. The king's letters. Damn Interesting, 8 August 2016.

2015     [link]

Rich Smith. I feel like we say 'I feel like' all the time: The origins and virtues of one of English's most popular qualifiers. The Stranger, 15 July 2015.

2007     [link]

Marisa Brook. Jaw of life [letter]. The Globe and Mail, 14 August 2007.

2006     [link]

Marisa Brook. The birth of a language. Damn Interesting, 3 November 2006.