Claudio Mastrangelo
My name is Claudio Mastrangelo. Originally from Italy, I have a multilingual and multicultural background. I studied French, English and Spanish in secondary school. I start learning Japanese by myself when I was 13 and when I was 18, I moved to Brussels and I learnt Dutch. I studied a Bachelor degree in Translation and Interpreting at Free University of Brussels with French, English and Chinese. I attended my third year at Beijing Language and Culture University where I discovered more about Chinese language and culture. In 2016, I moved to Madrid to study a Master in English linguistics and in 2019, I also studied a Master in Teaching. In 2021, I passed the national exam to become an English teacher in secondary schools around the country. I embarked my PhD in 2019 as full-time student.
My PhD thesis is entitled: Fantastic Creatures Categorisation and Linguistic Relativity: Do We Think the Same? A Contrastive Cognitive Linguistic Study Applied to English, Spanish and Chinese. I started this research based on my passion for fantasy literature and world mythology. The aim of my PhD research is to discredit the strong version of the linguistics relativity hypothesis formulated by Sapir-Whorf by analysing how Chinese, Spanish and English speakers categorise unreal entities. My research showed that despite the differences between languages, there are some universal concepts that are shared among all communities around the world.
My dissertation has been presented in conferences like the first, second and third Annual PhD Students Congress at the Miguel Hernández University, the seventh International Conference on Cognitive Research in Translation and Interpreting organised by the Wuhan University of Technology, the first China-UK Symposium on Translation Studies by the University of Leeds, the PhDay by the Complutense University of Madrid, the fourth International UCM Predoctoral Conference on English Linguistics by the Complutense University of Madrid, the Fourth Congress of the Spanish Linguistics Society and the ninth International Conference in Meaning and Knowledge Representation by Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. My research has also been the topic of Bajo la lengua by Querida Podcast and Language and Linguistics by Untranslatable.co.