21-22 September 2012: Third International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC3). This was a meeting organized by my research group and the network English Linguistics Circle. The following speakers gave plenary presentations: José Manuel Igoa (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Pilar García-Mayo (University of the Basque Country), 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.
8-9 July 2010: as part of the activities of the network Corpus Design and Annotation, in which I participated 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.
29-30 January 2010, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS): I attended the foundational meeting of LingNet Europe. This is an initiative of the Hermann Paul Centre for Linguistics at the University of Freiburg which seeks to establish a small network of centres for linguistics and research groups in Europe, with the participation of research teams from the Universities of Antwerp, Bern, Bolzano, Freiburg, Fribourg, Leuven, Newcastle and Santiago de Compostela.
26 November 2009: the University of Santiago de Compostela was chosen by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation and the Spanish Ministry for Education as one of the nine universities in Spain which can opt for the recognition, in 2015, as Campuses of International Excellence. The objective of the Campus of International Excellence Programme is to fund innovative and competitive initiatives, and improve the international visibility of the top Spanish universities.
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 my research group, the School of English at the University of Newcastle, and the Functional Linguistics group at the University of Leuven.
June 2009: following a meeting held at ICAME30 (Lancaster) on 28 May 2009, my research group has 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 visit <http://www.usc-vlcg.es/ARCHER.htm>.
10-11 May 2008: My student Carlos Prado-Alonso and other postgrads organized the First ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC1). Ingo Plag (University of Siegen), Geoffrey K. Pullum (University of Edinburgh) and Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh) presented the following plenary papers:
-- Ingo Plag: "Creoles as interlanguages: predictions and implications"
-- Geoffrey K. Pullum: "The discipline where time stood still: stagnation in the
study of English grammar, and what we can do about it"
-- Antonella Sorace: "Variation and instability in bilingual speakers: seeing both the
forest and the trees"
The ELC (English Linguistics Circle) is a network involving our research team (Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization) and the teams SPERTUS (Spoken English Research at the University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios), Cognitive Processes and Behaviour (University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Isabel Fraga), Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez-Guerra), and Methods and Materials for the Teaching and Acquisition of Foreign Languages (University of Vigo; Director: Rosa Alonso).
