Dr. Martha Mendoza teaches Linguistics and Spanish Linguistics. She has taught courses on: History of Spanish, Structure of Spanish, Spanish Morpho-Syntax, Spanish Phonology & Dialectology, Semantics, Pragmatics, Bilingualism, Grammaticalization, and Cognitive Linguistics, among others. Her research fields include linguistic politeness, grammaticalization, language contact, bilingualism, spatial language, P'urhepecha (Mexican indigenous language), and Spanish in the US.

Among her recent publications are: “Polite Diminutives in Spanish: A Matter of Size?” (John Benjamins, 2005); "Derivational Resources in P'urhepecha: Morphological Complexity and Verb Formation" (Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2007); and  “Spatial Language in Tarascan: Body Parts, Shape, and the Grammar of Location” (Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2012).

In Spring 2006, Dr. Mendoza was a visiting Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught Hispanic Linguistics. In 2008, she won the award for Excellence and Innovation in Undergraduate Advising.

Currently, she is working on a compilation of a bilingual dictionary P'urhepecha-Spanish.