Research Projects

In 1990, together with a team of scholars based at the Department of English of the University of Santiago de Compostela, I started work on the research project Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization. We carry out theoretically-informed corpus-based research on grammatical change in the history of English and on changes going on in Present-day English, and try to explain their mechanisms and causes.

In the recent past we have hosted the two most important international conferences in the fields of English historical linguistics and grammaticalization research, namely the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (11 ICEHL), in September 2000, and the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization (NRG3), in July 2005; later meetings in these series were held in Munich (15 ICEHL) and Leuven (NRG4).  

For the period 2007-2012 the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation has included the project in the category CONSOLIDER, a Programme of Excellence intended to promote high-quality scientific research. We have also received funding from the European Regional Development Fund and other authorities and organizations, as follows (direct grants not including PhD support):

• 01/08/1991-01/08/1994: Spanish Ministry for Education and Science (grant PB90-0370). 15 025 €
• 01/08/1995-01/08/1998: Spanish Ministry for Education and Science (grant PB 94-0619). 18 030 €
• 01/10/1998-01/10/2001: Spanish Ministry for Education and Culture (grant PB 97-0507). 19 532 €
• 01/08/2001-01/08/2004: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant PGIDT01PXI20404PR). 37 142 €.
• 28/12/2001-27/12/2004: Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology (grant BFF2001-2914). 48 519 €
• 14/08/2002-13/08/2005: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant PGIDIT02PXIC20402PN). 20 621 €
• 13/12/2004-12/12/2007: Spanish Ministry for Education and Science (grant HUM2004-00940). 77 920 €
• 12/07/2005-12/07/2008: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant PGIDIT05PXIC20401PN). 21 100 €
• 20/12/2006-19/12/2008: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2006/14-0). 73 125 €
• 01/03/2007-28/02/2008: Spanish Ministry for Education and Science & Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2006-19 / 34 000 €)
• 01/01/2008-31/12/2010: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2008/047). 150 000 €
• 02/08/2008-01/08/2011: Autonomous Government of Galicia (INCITE grant 08PXIB204016PR). 33 810 €
• 01/01/2009-31/12/2010: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2009/047). 120 000 €
• 01/10/2007-30/09/2012: Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (grant HUM2007-60706). 121 000 €

For my research on English sentential complementation from 1700 to the present day I compiled an electronic database of British and American English covering the years 1700 to 1879 (A Corpus of Late Modern British and American English Prose = COLMOBAENG). It has about 1 170 000 words (800 000 BrE; 370 000 AmE) and comprises both fiction and nonfiction texts distributed by date in four different subperiods, as follows: 1700-1726 (BrE only; 200 000 words), 1732-1757 (200 000 words BrE; 50 000 words AmE), 1761-1797 (200 000 words BrE; 120 000 words AmE), 1850-1879 (BrE and AmE; 200 000 words each).

Another area of research on which I am currently working is the historical development of verbs of manner of motion in English and Spanish. Some preliminary results of my investigation were presented at the Fifteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, held in August 2008 at the University of Munich.