Rate My Professor Monica Cabrera

Mónica Cabrera is Professor of Modern Languages (Spanish) and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University. She joined the faculty in 2005 as Assistant Professor and has since been promoted to full Professor while serving in leadership roles, including as a member of the LMU Faculty Senate (At Large 1, term through 2027). Cabrera earned her B.A. from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in 1991, M.A. from the University of Southern California in 2001, and Ph.D. from USC in 2005. Her academic career focuses on linguistics within Spanish language studies, contributing to departmental advising, placement exams, and curriculum in modern languages.

Cabrera's research centers on second language acquisition of Spanish syntactic structures, particularly inchoative, anticausative, and periphrastic causative constructions, as well as interfaces between syntax, semantics, prosody, and lexicon. She co-edited the volume Exploring Interfaces: The Syntax of Third Language Acquisition with José Camacho (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which includes chapters on topics such as the role of P in Spanish unaccusative constructions, pronominal clitics in Greek, scope and prosody in Russian heritage languages, dialectal variation in VOS word order in Spanish, and linearization in adjective ordering. Other key publications include 'The L2 Acquisition of Inchoative Structures by L1 Spanish Speakers' (Florida Linguistics Papers, 2016), 'Intransitive/Inchoative Structures in L2 Spanish' (Selected Proceedings of the 12th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 2010), and a review of Understanding and Teaching the Indirect Object in Spanish by Luis H. González (Hispania 108(2), 2025, pp. 312-314). She has supervised undergraduate honors theses, including Alanna Quinn's 'Grammatical Gender Acquisition in L2 Spanish' (2018) and Lauren F. Wilkins' 'Periphrastic Causatives within Second Language Acquisition.' As an Indigenous Qichwa faculty member, Cabrera participates in LMU's Indigenous Heritage Month observances. She has organized workshops, such as the Workshop on Person & Perspective, and teaches advanced courses on Spanish language acquisition.