Research Projects

TEAM

Head researchers

 

 

 

Elena Domínguez Romero is Associate Professor at the Complutense University, Madrid. Her recent research interests comprise evidentiality and positioning in media discourse as well as applied linguistics to innovative teaching research. She is co-editor of the volumes Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality: Conceptual and Descriptive Issues (Peter Lang, 2023), Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages (Peter Lang, 2017), and Thinking Modally. English and Contrastive Studies on Modality (Cambridge Scholars, 2015). She authors articles in international refereed journals (Journal of Pragmatics, 2022, 2021; Intercultural Pragmatics, 2019; Computer Assisted Language Learning, 2020; Education and Information Technologies, 2020; Teaching English with Technology, 2020; Thinking Skills and Creativity, 2020) and book chapters and additional co-edited volumes in DeGruyter (‘Evidentiality in Galician’ 2022, ‘Evidentiality in Portuguese’ 2022), Peter Lang, Routledge, Springer, Palgrave, IGI Global, Multilingual Matters, Bloomsbury or McGraw Hill.

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Marta Carretero is Professor at the Complutense University, Madrid. Her research concentrates on modality, evidentiality and evaluative language, including approaches to theoretical issues as well as descriptive work mainly on English and Spanish. She authors numerous articles and reviews in international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Functions of Language and Language in Contrast, and also in Spanish journals. She is co-editor of the books English Modality: Core, Periphery and Evidentiality (De Gruyter Mouton, 2013), Evidentiality Revisited: Cognitive Grammar, Functional and Discourse-Pragmatic Perspectives (John Benjamins, 2017) and Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages (Peter Lang, 2017). She directed the project titled Evidentiality: A Discourse-Pragmatic Study of English and other European Languages (EVIDISPRAG), and has continuously been a member of other projects funded by Spanish ministries. She chaired the ‘International Conference on Evidentiality and Modality 2018 (ICEM’18)’, and was managing editor of the academic journal Atlantis between 2006 and 2008. She currently lectures in semantics, pragmatics and functional linguistics, and has participated in many projects geared at innovation in lecturing.

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Researchers

 

 

Jelena Bobkina, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics Applied to Science and Technology at the Universidad Politécnica de  Madrid (UPM), where she teaches English for specific purposes. Her main publication and research interests are in computer-assisted language learning, discourse analysis in digital media environments, and EFL/ESL teaching methodology. Her work has appeared in journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning, Education Information Technologies, Teaching English with Technology, Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, and AILA Review, among others. She has recently co-edited two volumes published by IGI Global and Peter Lang. Her recent monographs appeared in ELT Council, Multilingual Matters, McGraw Hill, and Bloomsbury.

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Cristina Calle, PhD in English Linguistics, is Associate Professor at the Complutense University where she teaches English for Specific Purposes, in the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism. Besides, she has also been part of the teaching staff at Camilo José Cela University (2010-2020), teaching in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Education in the area of Foreign Language, in the Master of International Education and Bilingualism, Master of Secondary Education as well as in the Degree of Infant and Primary Education. In addition, she has had the opportunity to give training courses for teachers in bilingual secondary schools as a result of her studies on English teaching methodology, educational resources and new technologies used in the language classroom. Her extensive teaching experience has allowed her to participate as a speaker in more than 40 congresses on research and language teaching. Currently her teaching career is completed with her studies oriented to the role of teaching/learning English in the digital era, the application of information technologies in the university environment and strategies in integrated language learning.

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Anda-Lucía Ciltan is currently a full-time PhD student in English Linguistics under an international joint supervision between Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Bucharest. Her PhD research looks into the semantics and pragmatics of deontic modality; more precisely, it is a contrastive study which focuses on commissive strategies in English, Spanish and Romanian. Consequently, her research field comprises pragmatics and intercultural linguistics, but also language attitudes, SLA and FLT.

She holds a B.A. in English and Spanish as Applied Modern Languages and two M.A.s, one in English Linguistics, and the other in Hispanic Studies. She is currently working as an Assistant Lecturer at the Complutense University of Madrid.

So far, she has presented multiple papers at international conferences, among which one entitled The influence of a Spanish educational background in the usage of Spanish phase periphrases by Romanian native speakers living in Spain at the international conference of “Young Researchers in Philology”, celebrated on 23 October 2020, which was also published at Peter Lang Publishing. Another contribution of hers is the study Las oraciones posesivas – propuesta didáctica, which she presented within the international colloquium “Convengercias y divergencias en el espacio iberoamericano”, on 15-17 July 2021. She has published two books and various articles in national and international journals, among which A task-based teaching proposal for raising awareness of commissive speech acts through English modal verbs, ISSN 2066-768X, volume 13, number 62, in 2020.

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Hans-Jörg Döhla is currently Professor at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His recent research interests comprise evidentiality and language contact, i.e. Guaraní evidential particles in the Paraguayan Spanish yellow press. He is co-editor of the volumes Konstruktionsgrammatische Zugänge zu romanischen Sprachen (Frank & Timme, 2021) and Contact varieties of Spanish and Spanish-lexified contact varieties (de Gruyter, 2024). He completed his habilitation in the field of Asian Ibero-Romance and French creoles, focusing on the synchronic state and diachronic development of differential object marking.

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Mercedes González Vázquez, is Lecturer of Galician Language at the University of Vigo. She graduated in Galician-Portuguese and Spanish Philology from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her doctoral research focused on modality and she has continued working on modal verbs and evidential expressions in Galician and Spanish.  As a result of this work, the publication of her book The sources of information: Typology, Semantics and Pragmatics of Evidentiality (2006) is to be highlighted. She has participated as researcher at the Spanish Corpus projects BDS and ARTHUS (University of Santiago de Compostela) and in the evidentiality projects “EUROEVIDMOD” and “EVIDISPRAG” (Complutense University in Madrid). She has been Teacher of Spanish as a foreign language at the Universities of Prague, Leeds and Vigo. She also held the position of Academic Coordinator at the Cervantes Institute in Leeds.

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Anja Hennemann is Associate Collaborator at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her recent research interests comprise evidentiality and language contact, i.e. Guaraní evidential particles in the Paraguayan Spanish yellow press. She is co-editor of the volumes Linguistic hybridity. Contact-induced and cognitively motivated grammaticalization and lexicalization processes in Romance Languages (Winter, 2022) and La interconexión de las categorías semántico-funcionales en algunas variedades del español. Estudios sobre la interacción de la temporalidad, aspectualidad, modalidad y evidencialidad (Peter Lang, 2021). She is also an active researcher in the field of Construction Grammar, being co-editor of the volume Konstruktionsgrammatische Zugänge zu romanischen Sprachen (Frank & Timme, 2021). She completed her habilitation in the field of information structure, focusing on the diachronic development of topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French.

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Julia Lavid-López is Full Professor of English Linguistics at Universidad Complutense de Madrid since 2006, where she has developed an outstanding academic career as researcher, instructor, faculty member and Chair of the department of English Philology I (2010-2014). She was elected Director of the Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas y Traductores (Research Institute for Modern Languages and Translation) at UCM in 2018 and continues in office. 

Julia has developed an international career in the USA, as invited visiting scholar at the ISI (Information Sciences Institute, USC), and in Europe, through her research stays and collaboration in multiple projects and research-networks funded by the European Commission, and other European funding bodies. Her research interests cover a wide range of topics related to the functional analysis of English (often in comparison with Spanish and other European languages), using computational and corpus-based methodologies. She has an extensive list of high-impact publications, including nine books and more than ninety articles published in international journals or as book chapters in international collective volumes, presented papers and given plenary talks at many international conferences.

She has also been the principal investigator of multiple research projects, funded by national and international institutions, and is currently Principal Investigator of the FUNCAP research group at Universidad Complutense, with external collaborations with outstanding research groups in Europe, Canada and the USA. Julia also has an extensive editorial experience, as co-editor-in-chief of the Complutense Journal of English Studies (Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense) for ten years (2005-2015), and as member of the editorial boards of numerous international journals. She has served in numerous international scientific committees and evaluated book proposals for highly-reputed international publishers.

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Victoria Martín de la Rosa is Associate Professor of English language and linguistics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her main research interest centres on the use of evidentiality and modality in UN Resolutions and media discourse as well as on the use of critical metaphor in political and educational discourse. 

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Sergio Monforte del Valle PhD in Basque Linguistics and Philology (UPV/EHU, 2020). I defended my thesis entitled Basque particles -a, al and ote in questions: syntax, microvariability and interpretation. I studied in the same field at the Faculty of Letters of Vitoria-Gasteiz: Master of Basque Linguistics and Philology (UPV/EHU, 2015) and Bachelor of Basque Philology (UPV/EHU, 2013). My interests lie in the Basque language, modal and discourse particles, ebidential and epistemic markers and their syntax and pragmatics. I currently focus on the syntax of modal particles and sentential adverbs in Basque, considering their interpretation, crosslinguistic data and historical data.

 

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Natalia Mora López holds a PhD in English linguistics from the Complutense University of Madrid, where she works as an adjunct professor. She has worked as a computational linguist, translator and proof-reader, and she has taught Spanish language and literature in middle education as well as English language in middle and higher education at several Spanish universities. She currently teaches English for Specific Purposes. Her research focuses on educational innovation, corpus linguistics, the use of evaluative language and the expression of opinion in digital media.

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Lara Moratón-Gutiérrez holds a Phd in Corpus and Computational Linguistics from Complutense University. Her research interests cover functional analysis of English (in comparison with Spanish), using computational and corpus-based methodologies, natural language understanding or linguistics applied to accessibility in new technologies.
From 2009 until 2021 she combined her studies and teaching at the Complutense University with her work as a computational linguist in different companies: Fonetic, Molino de Ideas, Nimbus or Samsung, among others. She held positions of responsibility in the areas of Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation for IVR (Interactive Voice Response Systems) and Voice Assistants (Chatbots). She also led the Localization team at Samsung Electronics for Spanish, Basque, Catalan and Galician for 8 years, with which she obtained several awards for the quality of their work. In recent years, she has become interested in bringing linguistics closer to the world of accessibility through new technologies, participating in various projects (recording podcasts, Fundación ONCE) and national and international conferences (Zerocon21, Aging Bilbao ...).
Since 2021 she is Assistant Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

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Begoña Núñez-Perucha is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies: Linguistics and Literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research interests lie in the field of discourse analysis and, more specifically, along the lines of critical and functional approaches. From a critical perspective, her research has focused on the intersection of Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Gender Studies, and, Critical Discourse Analysis and Higher Education Discourse. Within these interdisciplinary areas of research, she has addressed the relation between discourse strategies, cognitive mechanisms and the sociocultural/ideological context in several types of discourses: narrative discourse, political discourse, educational discourse and advertising discourse. From a functional perspective, her research has explored stance and (inter)subjectivity in media discourse (e.g. journalistic discourse and interviews) using appraisal theory. She has also carried out research into second language acquisition drawing on the use of genre-based approaches both for the analysis of lecture discourse in an English-medium instruction context and for the analysis and evaluation of academic writing at university, an area where she has coordinated an innovative teaching research project.

Dr Núñez-Perucha has participated in numerous national and international research projects and served as an external reviewer for several scientific journals. She has also given teacher-training workshops on developing communicative language competence in EFL and CLIL/EMI classes, and since 2016 she has been involved in the UCM teacher training programme. She coordinated the Master´s Programme in English Linguistics: New Applications and Intercultural Communication” from July 2017 to July 2022.

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María Pérez Blanco is Associate Professor at the University of Leon, Spain. Her main research areas are contrastive linguistics (English-Spanish) and corpus linguistics, from a functional and applied approach to language. Her current interests include (1) modality, evidentiality and evaluative language in journalistic opinion discourse and (2) contrastive analysis in the areas of grammar, phraseology and rhetoric of specific (under researched) genres and text types that facilitate the development of corpus-based tools and applications. She authors articles in refereed national and international journals (Languages in Contrast, Journal of Pragmatics, ESP, RESLA) and book chapters edited by prestigious publishers (John Benjamins and Peter Lang, among others). She is the co-editor of Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages (Peter Lang, 2017).

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Anna Ruskan is Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology at Vilnius University. Her research focuses on stance, evidentiality, epistemic modality, discourse markers, corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, academic discourse and media discourse. She has participated in national and international projects related to stance, modality, evidentiality and discourse markers (i.e. Realizations of modality and evidentiality in Lithuanian; Discourse markers in Lithuanian: a synchronic and diachronic study;  Evidentiality: A discourse-pragmatic study of English and other European languages; Stance and subjectivity in discourse: Towards an integrated framework for the analysis of epistemicity, effectivity, evaluation and inter/subjectivity from a critical discourse perspective). Her publications include articles on epistemic qualifications, stance, discourse markers and contrastive linguistics.

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Alfonso Sánchez- Moya holds a PhD in English Linguistics (Complutense University of Madrid and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) since 2018, for which he received the Extraordinary PhD Award (Faculty of Philology, 2018-2019). His research interests focus on critical discourse analysis, mainly examining socio-political scenarios characterised by power imbalances. His work has paid special attention to discourse in digital contexts. His graduate research, funded by a `la Caixa’ Foundation and predoctoral research contract (FPU, Spanish Ministry of Science and Education), entails a socio-cognitive exploration of the discourse by female survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in digital environments. As part of his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University (2019-2021), he has been looking at metaphorical representations of migrants in the US. He is currently the principal coordinator of the research group CEIVINDICO, integrated by several European universities in the UNA Europa network. He is currently expanding his knowledge on the impact of AI, NLU/NLP and LLMs on discourse and communication. Further details of his academic and professional CV can be found at www.alfonsosanchezmoya.com

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Jolanta Šinkūnienė's research interests include corpus linguistics, contrastive semantics and pragmatics, modality and evidentialitywith a particularly focus on cross-linguistic aspects of author stance expression.  She conducted a number of studies into the use of discourse markers and modal expressions employing both parallel and comparable corpora. Together with her colleagues, she has investigated realizations of epistemicity and multifunctionality in English, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Dutch. Jolanta regularly presents her research in national and international conferences, conducts seminars for students and researchers.  

www.jolantasinkuniene.wordpress.com

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Anna Socka is Associate Professor at the Department of German Philology at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her research concentrates on modality and evidentiality, especially in interrelationship with aspectuality and other linguistic categories in German and Polish. She recently published Satzadverbien und Modalverben als Marker der Reportativität im Deutschen und Polnischen (Peter Lang, 2021). She is co-editor of the volumes Kommunikationswelten. Sprache und Medien in transkulturellen Räumen (2022) and Die Grammatik der Modalität und Evidentialität im Deutschen (to appear 2023). She has participated as researcher in the projects EVIDSPRAG (Complutense University in Madrid) and DiasPol „The Development of the Polish Aspect System in the Last 250 Years against the Background of Neighbouring Languages“ (Univ. of Warsaw, Poland, and University of Mainz, Germany), among others.

Google Scholar Profile: https://scholar.google.pl/citations?user=QDUKQcoAAAAJ&hl=en

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Audronė Šolienė is Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology of the Faculty of Philology in Vilnius University, Lithuania. She has lectured on a variety of subjects including English Grammar, Phrase Structure Grammar, Corpus Linguistics, Semantics, Contrastive Analysis, and Subjectivity across Languages, Varieties, Discourses and Genres. In 2013 she defended her PhD thesis titled “Realisations of Epistemic Modality in English and Lithuanian: Parameters of Equivalence”. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, epistemic modality, evidentiality, stance and subjectivity, discourse markers as well as translation. The scholar was involved in a number of national and international research projects focussing on the issues of modality, evidentiality, (inter)subjectivity, and discourse markers.

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Radoslava Trnavac is Associate Professor at the School of Linguistics, The National Research University Higher School of Economics. She obtained her Ph.D. degree titled Aspect and subjectivity in modal constructions from Leiden University (the Netherlands). Radoslava finished her postdoctoral studies in Canada, in the Department of Linguistics (Simon Fraser University). She worked on a project Discourse parsing for summarization and sentiment detection under supervision of Dr. Maite Taboada (Simon Fraser University). Her research areas are the following: evaluation and subjectivity in language, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and intercultural pragmatics based on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. She authors articles in international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Functions of Language, Corpora, Language Sciences, Text and Talk, Corpus Pragmatics.

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_1LPlGAAAAAJ&hl=en

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Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla obtained his PhD in English Literature and Linguistics in 2006 from the Complutense University of Madrid. His thesis, titled The generation of tense and aspect in English and Spanish, is a contrastive analysis taking a systemic-functional approach to language. He has been teaching as full-time, non-tenure-track lecturer in the department of English Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid since 2010. His publications revolve around corpus linguistics, contrastive analysis English-Spanish, and tense, modality and evidentiality. He has participated in various projects on modality and corpus annotation, and is currently a member of the FUNCAP research group. His teaching covers different subjects in the areas of English as a foreign language and linguistics applied to the English language.

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Advisors

 

 

 

Juana I. Marín-Arrese is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of English Studies: Linguistics and Literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Dr. Marín holds a PhD in English Philology (English Language and Linguistics), with Outstanding Doctoral Award (academic year 1991-92), from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a Master of Arts in Linguistics for English Language Teaching, from the University of Lancaster (UK). She was awarded the Fleming Award, Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia-British Council, 1984-1985, and the Fulbright/Hays Scholarship, Comisión de Intercambio Cultural entre España y los Estados Unidos de América, 1988-1989.

Her main research interests involve the fields of discourse, semantics and pragmatics, with specific interest in cognitive linguistics, critical discourse studies and cross-linguistic studies. Her recent research focuses on stancetaking and the expression of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity in discourse, and more specifically on the domains of evidentiality and modality. She has also carried out research on transitivity and voice, the middle domain, passive and impersonal constructions in Spanish and English. Her research interests also include studies on metaphor, multimodality and humour studies. Dr. Marín has published extensively in various journals and collective volumes and has contributed papers to over a hundred international conferences. Recent publications by Dr. Marín include papers in international journals (Journal of Pragmatics 2021; Culture, Language and Representation 2021; Culture, Language and Representation 2019; Kalbotyra 2017), chapters in collective volumes (Mouton de Gruyter 2022; John Benjamins 2021; Routledge 2020; John Benjamins 2020; Vernon Press 2020; John Benjamins 2018; John Benjamins 2017; Peter Lang 2017), and edited collective volumes and journal special issue (Mouton De Gruyter 2022; Journal of Pragmatics 2022; John Benjamins 2017; Peter Lang 2017).

Dr. Marín has been principal investigator in the national projects STANCEDISC (PGC2018-095798-B-I00); EUROEVIDMOD (FFI2011-23181); ACIE (BFF2000-0699-C02-02), and in projects of the Comunidad de Madrid (06/HSE/0272/2004), UCM-Santander (PR34/07-15798), and the UCM (PR52/00-8888). She is currently a member of the project PID2021-125327NB-I00. She has also participated as research member in 11 research projects and two research networks, at the European and national level. Dr. Marín has been founder and coordinator (2004-2021) of the UCM research group Discourse and Communication in English: Cognitive and Functional Perspectives(930160) (http://www.ucm.es/discom-cogfunc/).

Dr. Marín is member of the scientific committee or advisory board in a number of refereed journals (Atlantis, ESP Across Cultures, Kalbotyra, Lingua, RAEL, y RESLA), and has served as reviewer in miscellaneous journals indexed in JCR and similar journal rankings. She has been convenor of four international conferences on evidentiality modality and stance, and cognitive linguistics: STANCEDISC’20, 9-11 September 2020, EMEL’14, 6-8 October 2014; ModE4, 9-11 September 2010; y AELCO, 17-20 May 2000.

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DISCOM-COGFUNC Research Group

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Kasper Boye, University of Copenhagen

 

Daniel Xerri, University of Malta

 

Frank Serafini, Arizona State University