Semantic change: I study how words and constructions, in interaction with linguistic context and conversational logic, give rise to new meanings which may become encoded as a new, invariable meaning of the word over time. My research has primarily focused on the creation of epistemic adverbs in Spanish. I have also co-authored research on the development and progression of future tense forms (Spanish) and adversative connectives (Portuguese).
Politeness: Focusing on epistemic adverbs, I study how speakers use existing linguistic forms to create polite discourse and study how these forms come to be used with politeness functions over time.
US Spanish: Recently, I have begun investigating contact phenomena in US Spanish. In particular, I have analyzed the influence of English pragmatic norms on the production of Spanish speech acts in North Carolina. I am also studying the degree to which Spanish speakers outside of the US associate morphosyntactic and lexical contact phenomena with US Spanish speakers. I am particularly interested in understanding if US Spanish is emerging as a recognized macro-dialect of Spanish.
I employ a variety of methodologies in my research such as corpus analysis, acceptability judgment tasks, forced-choice preference tasks, and pragmatic role plays.
Journal articles
Jarrett, D. (2026). A Behavioral Profile of weak epistemic adverbs in Colombian Spanish. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 23(3). https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/cllt-2025-0108/html
Escalona Torres, J. M., Jarrett, D., and Díaz-Campos, M. A. (2025). Expressing future tense in Spanish: A cross-dialectal comparative analysis. Spanish in Context, 22(2), 311-343.
Jarrett, D. (2024). The acceptability of epistemic adverbs in intersubjective contexts: Consideration of epistemic de pronto in Colombian Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics, 234, 19-33. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216624001917
Jarrett, D. and Gurzynski-Weiss, L. (2023). “Task-specific motivation and the development of Spanish L2 self during domestic immersion”. TASK. John Benjamins.
Amaral, P. and Jarrett, D. (2022). “Causality and the PA/SN distinction”. Linguistics. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0112
Amaral, P., Tian, Z., Jarrett, D. and Escalona Torres, J. M. (2022). “Tracing semantic change in Portuguese: A distributional approach to adversatives”. Journal of Historical Linguistics. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.21028.ama
Jarrett, D. (2020). “Developing epistemic meaning: a diachronic study of the Spanish adverb ‘a lo mejor’”. In D. Pascual y Cabo & I. Elola (Eds.), Current Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (pp. 215-231). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Book chapters
Jarrett, D. and Amaral, P. (2023). “Usage-based approaches to semantic change” in Díaz-Campos, M. and Balasch, S. (eds.) Handbook of Usage-Based Linguistics.
Gurzynski-Weiss, L., Giacomino, L., and Jarrett, D. (2021). “Examining high school learners’ experience of task motivation and difficulty in a two-week Spanish immersion camp”. In Ahmadian, M., & Long, M. (Eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Task-Based Language Teaching (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, pp. 566-584). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jarrett, D. and Weissman, B. "Metalinguistic awareness of contact phenomena in United States Spanish"
Jarrett, D. (2026) “Heritage Spanish apologies in Eastern North Carolina: Evidence of pragmatic transfer” Spanish Linguistics in the Southeast (SLISE) / Spanish Linguistics in North Carolina (SLINKI), February 2026, UNC Wilmington, Wilmington, NC.
Jarrett, D. (2025) “Triggering epistemic vigilance: The difference between posiblemente and quizás in contexts of expertise.” Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), September 2025, Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
Jarrett, D. (2024) “How expectations of speaker knowledge predict form selection: Epistemic adverbs in contexts of expertise” The Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS), October 2024, University of Nebraska, Omaha, NE.
Jarrett, D. (2024) “A corpus-based behavioral profile of synonymous epistemic adverbs in Colombian Spanish.” Spanish Linguistics in the Southeast (SLISE) / Spanish Linguistics in North Carolina (SLINKI), February 2024, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC.
Jarrett, D. (2023) “The speech act mitigation functions of three Spanish epistemic adverbs: Results from an acceptability judgment task.” The Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS), October 2023, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.