nEWS & EVENTS

1-4 September 2025: the team will host  ISLE 8 (8th Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English). It follows a series of conferences which started in 2008 (ISLE Inaugural Conference; Freiburg) and include ISLE2 (Boston, 2011), ISLE3 (Zurich, 2014), ISLE4 (Poznan, 2016), ISLE5 (London, 2018), ISLE6 (Joensuu, 2021) and ISLE7 (Brisbane, 2023).

26 July 2021: following the elections held online on 26th July 2021, María José López-Couso has been appointed Vice-President for Research of ISLE, the International Society for the Linguistics of English.

18 June 2021: the team has received a new research grant (PID2020-114604GB-100, Programa Estatal de Generación de Conocimiento, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación), for the project "Constructionalization in written and oral discourse: Evidence from historical and contemporary English(es)"; 42.350 euros plus one four-year PhD research position. PIs: María José López-Couso & Belén Méndez-Naya.

10 June 2021: it was announced that Noelia Castro-Chao has obtained a competitive three-year postdoctoral contract (ref. ED481B2021-046) funded by the Regional Goverment of Galicia, to start from 1 July 2021.

15 April 2021: Teresa Fanego and Paula Rodríguez-Puente have obtained the AESLA 2021 Book Award (‘Premio de Investigación de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada 2021’) for the volume Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 91, Amsterdam:  John Benjamins, 2019).

15 January 2021: it was announced that the International Doctorate School (EDIUS) has proposed the PhD dissertation of Iván Tamaredo-Meira for the Extraordinary Award 2018-2019, in competition with 23 other candidates in the field of Arts and Humanities.

30 November 2020: La convocatoria 2020 de Accións Transversais de Apoio á I+D del Vicerrectorado de Investigación e Innovación de la USC ha concedido al grupo VLCG dos ayudas de  €1.917 y  €1.178 para financiar la publicación en abierto (OA) de dos artículos aceptados en 2020 por revistas científicas del cuartil 1 del JCR, SJR o SCOPUS. Se trata de una convocatoria co-financiada por la Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidade da Xunta de Galicia, dentro de su convenio de colaboración con la USC.

18 September 2020: the team has obtained a new research grant (ref. ED431B 2020/01; 90.000 euros), within the programme 'Axudas do Programa de Consolidación e Estruturación de Unidades de Investigación Competitivas – GPC'. Funding institution: Regional Government of Galicia, Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidade. PI: Teresa Fanego.

31 August 2020: Paula Rodríguez-Puente’s research monograph The English phrasal verb, 1650-present. History, stylistic drifts, and lexicalisation (Cambridge University Press, 2019) has received the  ESSE 2020 Book Award in the category of English Language and Linguistics (€1,500).

14 November 2019: at the 43rd AEDEAN International Conference held at the University of Alicante Paula Rodríguez-Puente’s research monograph The English phrasal verb, 1650-present. History, stylistic drifts, and lexicalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) has received the prestigious 'Leocadio Martín Mingorance' Book Award on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 2019.

14 November 2019: at the 43rd AEDEAN International Conference held at the University of Alicante, Daniela Pettersson-Traba  received the 'Catalina Montes' Award to the best presentation by a PhD student, in the fields of theoretical and applied linguistics.

21-24 October 2019: María José López-Couso was invited to lecture at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages of the University of Oslo. She taught a master class on "Corpus linguistics and grammaticalization theory: How to approach controversial areas in grammaticalization studies through corpus data".

30 September 2019: it was announced that the Centro Internacional de Estudos de Doutoramento e Avanzados da USC  (CIEDUS) has proposed the PhD dissertations of Zeltia Blanco-Suárez and Tamara Bouso-Rivas for the Extraordinary Awards 2017-2018, in competition with 13 other candidates in the field of Arts and Humanities.

24 August 2019: Teresa Fanego has been appointed President of SLE, the Societas Linguisticae Europaea.

24 July 2019: it was announced that the Vicerrectorate for Research of the University of Oviedo has awarded funding (€ 6000) to Carlos Prado-Alonso for the research project “Estructuras sintácticas en la historia del inglés: perspectivas derivadas y basadas en corpus” (ref. 2019/00026/007; 01/01/2019-31/12/2019). The project’s team includes Ana Isabel Ojea López, Rodrigo Pérez Lorido and Paula Rodríguez-Puente.

1 July 2019: Idoya Cancelas León has been awarded a four-year FPI grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, to prepare her PhD in the context of our current research project on “Constructionalization in contemporary and earlier English: Cognitive, variationist and discourse-pragmatic perspectives” (ref. FFI2017-86884-P; PIs: María José López-Couso and Belén Méndez-Naya).

16 May 2019: Carlos Prado-Alonso and Paula Rodríguez-Puente have been appointed editors of Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL), the official journal of AELINCO, the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics. Their nomination and subsequent election took place during the business meeting of CILC XI, held at the University of Valencia from 15 to 17 May. 

12 November 2018: Cristina Lastres-López has been elected President of the Spanish Association of Young Researchers in Linguistics, and appointed Editor-in-Chief of  its online journal Estudios Interlingüísticos. [Click here for a press release on her nomination.]

7-9 November 2018: at the 42nd AEDEAN International Conference (University of Córdoba) Mario Serrano-Losada obtained the Catalina Montes Award to the best paper presented by a postgraduate student.

27 September 2018: it was announced that Mario Serrano-Losada has obtained a three-year competitive postdoctoral fellowship (reference ED481B 2018/041) from the Regional Government of Galicia.

31 August 2018: Teresa Fanego was appointed President Elect of the Societas Linguistica Europaea at the annual meeting of SLE held at the University of Tallinn. On 1 September 2019 she will become President. Some press releases can be found at http://elc.org.es/?p=2454

May 2018: Belén Méndez-Naya  has brilliantly passed the habilitation exam (‘acreditación’) qualifying her for promotion to a chair in English Language and Linguistics.

May 2018: Tamara Bouso has been officially accredited as ‘Ayudante Doctor’ by the Spanish National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA).

26 December 2017: it was announced that the project proposal submitted in July 2017 to the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness by María José López-Couso (IP1) and Belén Mendez-Naya (IP2) has received funding from the National Programme for Excellence in Scientific and Technical Research. Details of the project are as follows:

Grant no.: FFI2017-86884-P, for the period 01/01/2018 – 31/12/2020
Project title: “Constructionalization in contemporary and earlier English: Cognitive, variationist and discourse-pragmatic perspectives”
Funding awarded: 49.610 euros plus one four-year PhD research position

17-19 November 2017: International workshop on Gradience and Constructional Change, held at the University of Edinburgh. It was organised by VLCG in cooperation with the Universities of Edinburgh and KU Leuven, as one of the activities of our current research project on gradience, constructionalization and linguistic variation (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, grant no. FFI2014-52188-P; PI: Teresa Fanego). Click here for the final programme and list of presentations.

9 November 2017: at the 41st AEDEAN International Conference (University of La Laguna) Iván Tamaredo obtained the ‘Catalina Montes’ Award to the best paper presented by a postgraduate student. Please follow this link for a recent press release.

9 November 2017: at the 41st AEDEAN International Conference (University of La Laguna) María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo and Ignacio Palacios received the 'Leocadio Martín Mingorance' Research Award in English Language and Linguistics for the volume Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora (Language and Computers Series 79). Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2016.

20 October 2017: las Consellerías de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria, y Economía, Emprego e Industria de la Xunta de Galicia han concedido dos importantes ayudas de investigación al grupo VLCG:

• 01/01/2017 – 30/12/2019: ED431D 2017/09: Axudas do Programa de Consolidación e Estruturación de Unidades de Investigación Competitivas – Rede de Investigación English Linguistics Circle. Instituciones implicadas: Santiago de Compostela y Vigo. IP: Teresa Fanego. 120.000 euros.
• 01/01/2017 – 30/12/2019: ED431B 2017/12: Axudas do Programa de Consolidación e Estruturación de Unidades de Investigación Competitivas – GPC. IP: Teresa Fanego. 90.000 euros.

1June 2017: at the 9th International Conference of AELINCO (Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics) recently held at the Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7, María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo and Ignacio Palacios received the 1st Research Award Aquilino Sánchez (‘MODALIDAD A: Premio de investigación para investigadores/as experimentados/as’) for the volume Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora (Language and Computers Series 79). Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2016.

5 May 2017: at the 35th International Conference of AESLA (Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics) recently held at the University of Jaén, María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo and Ignacio Palacios received the prestigious 2017 AESLA Research Award (‘XX Premio de Investigación AESLA para investigadores/as experimentados’) for the volume Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora (Language and Computers Series 79). Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2016.

4-5 April 2017: Santiago-Leuven-Edinburgh seminar on Grammatical Variation and Change in English, KU Leuven. This two-day seminar was organised as part of a research project on gradience, constructionalization and linguistic variation involving the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, Edinburgh and Leuven. The project is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PI: Teresa Fanego, grant no. FFI2014-52188-P).

10 November 2016: at the 40th AEDEAN International Conference (University of Zaragoza at Huesca, 9-11 November 2016) Noelia Castro-Chao obtained the ‘Catalina Montes’ Award to the best paper presented by a postgraduate student.

10 June 2016: it was announced that Daniela Pettersson-Traba obtained a competitive three-year postgraduate grant from the Regional Government of Galicia, to prepare a PhD under the supervision of María José López-Couso.

9 March 2016: Raphael Berthele, Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) gave a seminar at the research unit on the topic "Posture in caused motion and in static spatial relations. Typological differences and convergence phenomena in Germanic and Romance varieties".

7 March 2016: Paula Rodríguez-Puente's dissertation on the development of phrasal verbs in British English from 1650 to 1990 has received the Extraordinary PhD Award 2012-2013 from the Faculty of Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

3 March 2016: at the 8th International Conference of the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics (AELINCO), held at the University of Málaga on 2-4 March 2016, Carlos Prado-Alonso was appointed scientific convenor of the panel “Corpus-based studies of variation and linguistic change”, for a three-year term. Carlos succeeds María José López-Couso.

17 February 2016: Lachlan MacKenzie, Emeritus Professor of Functional Linguistics at the Free University of Amsterdam and co-editor of the international journal Functions of Language, was invited by the VLCG team to give a seminar at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados (CEA) of the University of Santiago de Compostela, on the topic "Design and award criteria for European Union projects: a guide to the maze".

17 November 2015: Iván Tamaredo obtained a competitive four-year FPI grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, to prepare a PhD under the supervision of Teresa Fanego and J. Carlos Acuña-Fariña.

16 July 2015: it was announced that Noelia Castro-Chao has obtained a four-year FPU postgraduate grant (ref. FPU2014/03208) from the Spanish Ministry of Education. Noelia's PhD advisor is Teresa Fanego.

15 April 2015: the VLCG team has received funding from the National Programme for Excellence in Scientific and Technical Research (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness), to carry out the following project involving international cooperation with research teams from KU Leuven and Edinburgh: "Exploring gradience and constructionalization in linguistic variation: evidence from contemporary and historical English" (grant FFI2014-52188-P;  funding awarded:  89.540 €, plus one four-year PhD research position).  Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego.

28 September 2014: the Regional Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientific and Technological Promotion) granted us renewed funding (€120.000; grant R2014/016) for a two-year term (2014-2015), to support the activities of the research network English Linguistics Circle. Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego.

25 September 2014: it was announced that the VLCG team has earned renewed funding from the Regional Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientific and Technological Promotion) for the period 2014-2016 (grant no. GPC2014/004; €70.000). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego.

27 June 2014: it was announced that Mario Serrano-Losada has obtained a four-year FPU postgraduate grant from the Spanish Ministry of Education. Mario's PhD advisors are Teresa Fanego and Belén Méndez-Naya.

26-27 June 2014: Pascual Cantos, Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Murcia, visited the VLCG unit to teach a six-hour seminar on "Introducción a la cuantificación de datos lingüísticos: descripción estadística, toma de decisiones y modelaje". The outline and contents of the seminar can be found here.

7 November 2013: Mario Serrano-Losada was awarded a three-year I2C postgraduate grant (ref. PRE/2013/206) from the Directorate General for University Policy of the Regional Government of Galicia.

22-26 May 2013: the VLCG team hosted the 34th International Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME 34). Jenny Cheshire (Queen Mary University of London), Holger Diessel (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena), Marianne Hundt (University of Zurich) and Ken Hyland (Hong Kong) gave plenary presentations. The organising committee was chaired by María José López-Couso.

December 2012 onwards: Cristina Blanco-García and Tamara Bouso obtained four-year postgraduate grants from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness  and the Spanish Ministry of Education, respectively. Tamara’s PhD advisors are Teresa Fanego and Belén Méndez-Naya; Cristina’s PhD advisor is María José López-Couso

September-October 2012: Bernd Kortmann (Freiburg) and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Stanford) visited our research unit to teach seminars on the topics "Exploring grammatical variation in the Anglophone world" and "Constructional changes and Constructionalization", respectively. Click here to view a picture of Elizabeth Traugott with some members of staff and postgraduate students (from left to right: Cristina Suárez, Belén Méndez, Paloma Núñez, Zeltia Blanco, Teresa Fanego, Elizabeth Traugott, María José López-Couso, Aleksandra Kaverina, Tamara Bouso, Tania de Dios, Beatriz Mato, Cristina Blanco, Alba Pérez-González).

21-22 September 2012: Third International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC3). This was a meeting organized by the research group VLCG and the network English Linguistics Circle. Plenary speakers: José Manuel Igoa (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Pilar García-Mayo (University of the Basque Country), and Graeme Trousdale (University of Edinburgh).

October 2011: our PhD Programme in English Language and Literature received official recognition for Excellence from the Spanish Ministry of Education. Only four other PhD programmes in the field of English studies were awarded this distinction, namely the programmes at the universities of Murcia, Salamanca/Valladolid, Zaragoza and Madrid Complutense.

7 October 2011: It was announced that Tania de Dios and Beatriz Mato-Míguez have been awarded four-year FPU research grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education, to prepare PhDs under the supervision of María José López-Couso and Teresa Fanego.

27 September 2011: Lucía Loureiro-Porto obtained a position as tenured Senior Lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands. Here is a photograph of Lucía officially assuming her new ‘office’.

29 July 2011: the Autonomous Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientific and Technological Promotion) granted us renewed funding (€120.000; grant CN2011-011) for the research network English Linguistics Circle. Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego.

21 July 2011: we are proud to announce that we have received funding from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation for two new research projects, namely "Constructionalization and grammaticalization in English” (grant FFI2011-26693-C02-01 / €108.900 + 1 four-year research position) and “Morphosyntactic variation in New Englishes” (grant FFI2011-26693-C02-02 / €27.830). These projects will be carried out in coordination at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela (Principal Investigator: María José López-Couso) and the Balearic Islands (Principal Investigator: Cristina Suárez-Gómez).

8-10 June 2011: Liesbet Heyvaert (University of Leuven) visited our research unit and gave a seminar on “The semantics of the gerund”.

19 October 2010: Cristina Suárez-Gómez obtained a position as tenured Senior Lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands. Here is a photograph of Cristina officially assuming her new ‘office’.

8-9 July 2010: as part of the activities of the network Corpus Design and Annotation, in which we participate with eight other research groups from Galicia, we organized an international Seminar on Corpus Linguistics. The speakers were Dominique Longrée (Université de Liège), Mark Davies (Brigham Young University), Sebastian Hoffmann (Universität Trier), Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University), Amaya Mendikoetxea (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), and Christian Mair (Universität Freiburg). The programme can be found here.

4 May 2010: it was announced that Zeltia Blanco-Suárez has received the National Award for Academic Excellence from the Spanish Ministry of Education. Congratulations, Zeltia!

8-9 April 2010: Philip Durkin (OUP) and Kathryn Allan (UCL) visited our Department. Kathryn will be an invited speaker at the 11th ELC Research Seminar, with a talk on “An academic question? Exploring the meaning of a contemporary keyword through historical text resources”.

10 February 2010: Cristina Suárez-Gómez has passed the national examination to qualify for promotion to a position as tenured Senior Lecturer.

30-31 October 2009: the Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2) was held at the University of Vigo. The conference was organised by postgraduate students from the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela, and was supported by the English Linguistics Circle. The plenary speakers were María José López-Couso (Santiago), Geoff Thompson (Liverpool) and Terence Odlin (Ohio State University).

2-3 October 2009: the University of Vigo hosted the First Vigo-Newcastle-Santiago-Leuven International Workshop on the Structure of the Noun Phrase in English: Synchronic and Diachronic Explorations (NP1). This international workshop was organised by Javier Pérez-Guerra and his team at the University of Vigo, in cooperation with VLCG, with the School of English at the University of Newcastle, and with the Functional Linguistics group at the University of Leuven. NP2 will be held in 2011 at the University of Newcastle.

23 July 2009: it was announced that we have been awarded a new grant (2009/047; 120.000 euros) from the Autonomous Government of Galicia, to develop a network on Corpus Design and Annotation. The network is coordinated by Guillermo Rojo, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and comprises nine research groups from the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña and Vigo.

June 2009: following a meeting held at ICAME30 (Lancaster) on 28 May 2009, we have joined the international consortium of universities carrying out the expansion and tagging of ARCHER, the diachronic corpus of British and American English registers originally compiled by Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan in the early 1990s. For further information on this project see the entry ARCHER on this website.

27 May 2009: it was announced that our PhD students Iria-Gael Romay and Zeltia Blanco-Suárez had been awarded four-year FPU research grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education.

22 April 2009: Ronald W. Langacker (University of California at San Diego) taught a four-hour seminar on "The functional organization of English clauses". The course materials can be accessed here.

9-15 February 2009: Santiago González Fernández-Corugedo (University of Oviedo) taught a postgraduate seminaron Textual editing and criticism.

23 January 2009: Carlos Prado-Alonso has been awarded a three-year postdoctoral scholarship from the Directorate General for Research, Development and Innovation of the Autonomous Government of Galicia for the period December 2008 to December 2011.

19-27 November 2008: Anette Rosenbach (University of Paderborn) taught a postgraduate seminar on Determinants of grammatical variation in English.

14 November 2008: it was announced that the Autonomous Government of Galicia (Directorate General of Scientific and Technological Promotion) had awarded the team a new grant (2008/047 / 150 000 euros).

22-29 June 2008: Alexander Bergs (University of Osnabrück) stayed at our Department as a Visiting Professor to teach a graduate seminar on Sociohistorical linguistics: Principles and methods.14-25 June 2008: Gregory Ward (Northwestern University) stayed at our Department as a Visiting Professor to teach a graduate seminar on Information Structure and Word Order Variation. The course materials can be accessed here: Introduction; Theoretical preliminaries; Preposing; Argument Reversal, as also a picture from the last session.

10-11 May 2008: Carlos Prado-Alonso, Iria Pastor-Gómez and a group of postgraduate students from the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo organized the First ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics. The distinguished plenary speakers were Ingo Plag (University of Siegen), Geoffrey K. Pullum (University of Edinburgh) and Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh). Below you can find the titles and abstracts of their presentations, and some pictures.

• Ingo Plag: Creoles as interlanguages: predictions and implications [photo]
• Geoffrey K. Pullum: The discipline where time stood still: stagnation in the study of English grammar, and what we can do about it [photo]
• Antonella Sorace: Variation and instability in bilingual speakers: seeing both the forest and the trees [photo]

The ELC (English Linguistics Circle) is a network funded by the Autonomous Government of Galicia; it involves our team and the research teams SPERTUS (Spoken English Research at the University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios) and Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez-Guerra).

19-24 February 2008: Sali A. Tagliamonte (University of Toronto) stayed in Santiago to teach a postgraduate seminar on the topic Goldvarb-ing: Everything you always wanted to know about variation analysis. An outline of the seminar can be found here.

5 July 2007: it was announced that the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science had awarded the team a new grant (HUM2007-60706) and had included the project in the category CONSOLIDER, a Programme of Excellence intended to promote high-quality scientific research.

3-10 June 2007: Karin Aijmer (Göteborg University) visited the Department of English to teach a postgraduate seminar on “Discourse and corpus studies: Theory and applications”.

31 May 2007: Torsten Leuschner (Ghent University) and Debra Ziegeler visited the Department of English and gave lectures on the topics "Hypotaxis as building-site: The grammaticalization of concessive conditionals" and "Retention and anti-retention in contact grammaticalization", respectively .

5-9 March 2007: Päivi Pahta (University of Tampere) lectured on "Diachronic perspectives on the language of science". Click here to see a photograph of Paivi, with Elena Seoane and Teresa Fanego,  during her stay in Santiago.

20 December 2006: the research group obtained a new grant (reference no. 2006/14-0; Directorate General of Scientific and Technological Promotion, Autonomous Government of Galicia) to increase its cooperation with the research groups SPERTUS (Spoken English Research at the University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios) and Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez-Guerra).

2 December 2006: Hubert Cuyckens (University of Leuven) visited the Department of English and gave a lecture on "Clausal complementation in English: Variation and change".

October-November 2006: Nikolaus Ritt (University of Vienna) stayed at the Department of English to teach a postgraduate seminar and several undergraduate courses.

October 2006: Vladimir Plungian (Russian Academy of Sciences) visited the Department of English and gave a lecture on the typology of discontinuous past marking.

June 2006: Christopher S. Butler (Swansea University) and Geoffrey Leech (University of Lancaster) stayed at the Department as Visiting Professors. The latter was interviewed by Paloma Núñez-Pertejo; click here to read his very interesting comments on teaching, research, and corpus linguistics.

April 2006: Johan van der Auwera (University of Antwerp) stayed at the Department of English teaching a postgraduate course on typology.