Author Archives: teresa

Fátima Faya Cerqueiro, a member of the VLCG team, has brilliantly passed the examination for promotion to a permanent position as ‘Contratada Doctora’ (Associate Professor) at the USC.

Congratulations!

The following invited speakers have agreed to participate in the research seminars to be held this term:

• Thursday, 28 January, 5:00-6:30 pm: Iria de Dios Flores (USC), “Negative Polarity Item illusions: experimental and theoretical insights.” [26th ELC Research Seminar]
• Monday, 22 February, 5:00-6:30 pm: José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo (University of Alicante), “Don’t take it out on words, blame the suffixes: On the morphopragmatic properties of pejorative suffixation in English.” [27th ELC Research Seminar]
• Monday, 15 March, 5:00-6:30 pm: Gunther Kaltenböck (University of Graz, Austria), “Discourse Grammar and its applications: Evidence from language disorder and diachrony.”  [28th ELC Research Seminar]

We are pleased to announce that ELC keeps growing: several new tenured members have recently joined the network, among others Susana Doval Suárez and Elsa González Álvarez, both affiliated now to the SPERTUS team coordinated by Ignacio Palacios Martínez.

Welcome!

La convocatoria 2020 de Accións Transversais de Apoio á I+D del Vicerrectorado de Investigación e Innovación de la USC,  co-financiada por la Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidade da Xunta de Galicia, ha concedido al grupo VLCG una ayuda por valor de  €3.095 para costear la publicación en abierto de dos artículos aceptados en 2020 por revistas científicas del cuartil 1 del JCR/SJR/SCOPUS. Están accesibles en los siguientes enlaces:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0075424220945008

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216619306691?via%3Dihub

A new research seminar will be held online, via Microsoft Teams, on Tuesday, 15 December, 5:00 – 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Dr Noelia Castro-Chao (USC)

Title of talk: “Pathways to English complement clauses: from adverbial subordination to complementation in object territory”

Convenor: Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (UVigo)

Certificates of attendance will be issued. Registration is free. Those interested in connecting online, please send an email to Lidia Gómez García (lidiagogar@gmail.com), indicating the name and surname with which you wish to appear on the certificate.
A Teams link will be sent to you a few days before the seminar.

Abstract of talk:
Previous research has shown that certain originally adverbial subordinators, such as as if in (1), may acquire complementiser function over time, thereby coming to serve as (near‑)equivalents of the declarative complementiser that.

(1)  It seemed as if / that he was trying to hide his true identity.

López-Couso & Méndez-Naya (2012, 2015, among others) have extensively discussed the complementiser use of a number of adverbial links which have followed this course of development. The authors show that these so-called ‘minor’ complementisers typically originate in subordinating links introducing clauses of Comparison (as if, as though) and Negative Purpose (lest), among others. The change under discussion has been interpreted as a case of secondary grammaticalisation, illustrating a process of increased grammaticalisation of already grammatical items in specific contexts (see Givón 1991: 305).

This presentation addresses the same phenomenon in an adverbial domain not explored to date, namely, the domain of Time (Kortmann 1997: 84–85). More specifically, Castro-Chao will consider the history and use of two temporal subordinators, till and until, which are attested in complementiser function in Early and Late Modern English.

The study draws on data from a number of sources, including Early English Books Online (1470s–1690s; Davies 2017) and the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0 (1710–1920; De Smet et al. 2013).

References:
Davies, Mark. 2017. Early English Books Online. Part of the SAMUELS project. https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/.
De Smet, Hendrik, Hans-Jürgen Diller & Jukka Tyrkkö. 2013. The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0. Leuven: KU Leuven.
Givón, Talmy. 1991. The evolution of dependent clause morpho-syntax in Bibliblical Hebrew. In Elizabeth C. Traugott  & Bernd Heine, eds. Approaches to grammaticalization, Volume II, 257-310. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial subordination: A typology and history of adverbial subordinators based on European languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
López-Couso, María José & Belén Méndez-Naya. 2012. On the use of as if, as though and like in Present-day English complementation structures. Journal of English Linguistics 40(2): 172–195.
López-Couso, María José & Belén Méndez-Naya. 2015. Secondary grammaticalization in clause combining: From adverbial subordination to complementation in English. Language Sciences 47: 188–198.

At the General Assembly of AEDEAN held on 13 November, Evelyn Gandón Chapela, a member of the LVTC team, has received the prestigious ‘Leocadio Martín Mingorance’ Book Award on Theoretical and Applied English Linguistics 2020 for her research monograph On Invisible Language in Modern English: A Corpus-based Approach to Ellipsis (London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi & Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ISBN:  9781350064515. 289 pp.).

This book, originating in the author’s PhD thesis, supervised by Javier Pérez Guerra,  investigates the syntactic phenomenon of ellipsis and the linguistic forces that trigger it.

Additional detailed information (and a nice picture of Evelyn) can be found at http://lvtc.uvigo.es/blog/aedean-prizes-lvtc-research

Congratulations!

A new research seminar will be held online, via Microsoft Teams, on Thursday, 26 November, 5:30 – 7 pm.

Invited speaker: Carolina Amador-Moreno (University of Bergen / University of Extremadura)

Topic: “Sure he does be always telling me my heart is too near my mouth: Irish English discourse markers in perspective” (Click on the title to watch the video recording of the seminar)

Professor Amador-Moreno’s talk is at the intersection of three different fields of research: Corpus Linguistics, Varieties of English, and Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis.

Certificates of attendance will be issued.

Registration is free. Those interested in connecting online, please send an email to Lidia Gómez García (lidiagogar@gmail.com), indicating the name and surname with which you wish to appear on the certificate.

A Teams link will be sent to you a few days before the seminar.

This seminar is generously supported by SEFORIN (Seminario de Formación e Innovación, Facultade de Filoloxía da USC)

A new research seminar will be held online, via Microsoft Teams, on Wednesday, 11 November, 5 pm.

Invited speaker: Ana Rita Sá Leite Dias (USC)

Title: “On the syntactic vs. lexical nature of grammatical gender: the Gender Acquisition and Processing (GAP) hypothesis” (Click on the title to watch the video recording of the seminar)

Convenor: Isabel Fraga

Certificates of attendance will be issued.

Registration is free. Those interested in connecting online, please send an email to Lidia Gómez García (lidiagogar@gmail.com), indicating the name and surname with which you wish to appear on the certificate.

A Teams link will be sent to you a few days before the seminar.

The following PhD dissertations have been submitted and will be publicly defended in the coming weeks:

Héctor Agrafojo Blanco, “The pragmatic markers KIND OF and SORT OF in World Englishes”. Supervisors: Elena Seoane and Lucía Loureiro-Porto. To be defended Thursday 3 December.

Carla Bouzada Jabois, “Nonfinite supplements in the recent history of  English” (Cotutelle doctorate opting to an International Mention). Supervisors: Javier Pérez Guerra and Hubert Cuyckens (KU Leuven).  To be defended Friday 4 December, from 4 pm.

Raquel Pereira Romasanta, “Variation in the clausal complentation system in World Englishes: A corpus-based study of REGRET” (opting to an International Mention). Supervisors: Elena Seoane and Manfred Krug (University of Bamberg). To be defended Monday 14 December.

Sofía Bemposta Rivas, “Verb-governed infinitival complementation in the recent history of English” (opting to an International Mention). Supervisor: Javier Pérez Guerra. To be defended Friday 18 December, from 11 am.

El jueves 22 de octubre, a partir de las 10:30 horas, tendrá lugar la defensa telemática de la tesis de Cristina Lastres-López sobre el tema A functional-pragmatic approach to if/si-constructions in English, French and Spanish: A corpus-based study.

Directora: Teresa Fanego
Tutora: Paloma Núñez-Pertejo

Esta tesis examina las construcciones introducidas por si o if en las tres lenguas indicadas en su título, tanto en sus usos como subordinadas adverbiales como en sus usos como oraciones insubordinadas independientes (e.g., Esp. Si es que no hacen nada!). Los registros objeto de análisis son el discurso parlamentario y las conversaciones.

La tesis opta a Mención Internacional; componen el tribunal los profesores Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez (USC), Diana M. Lewis (Aix-Marseille) y J. Carlos Prado Alonso (Oviedo).

Las personas interesadas en asistir a la defensa como público pueden hacerlo a través de Microsoft Teams, pulsando en el siguiente enlace facilitado por la EDIUS:

https://www.usc.gal/es/centros/ciedus/teses/instrucions_asistencia_tese.html