Reaction objects in English and Spanish

Monserrat Martínez Vázquez delivered a lecture on the syntax and semantics of reaction object constructions (Levin 1993) in English and Spanish. These structures include non-subcategorised objects which express a reaction which is realised by means of the verbal action (Pauline smiled her thanks = ‘Pauline expressed her thanks by smiling’). Fom Talmy (1985) it has been claimed in the literature that Spanish as well as other Romance languages, does not tolerate such fused constructions. Prof Martínez Vázquez has developed an analysis based on the CREA corpus (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) and offered examples which puts some of the previous claims into question.
CV: Montserrat Martínez Vázquez, Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University Pablo de Olavide in Seville, has held academic and research positions at different Universities (Harvard, Seville, Extremadura, Huelva and Pablo de Olavide). Her main area of research is the analysis of argument structure from a constructional perspective. She is coordinator of a research group on Contrastive Linguistics and has coordinated three linguistics projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. She is editor of the three first volumes of Syntaxis. An International Journal of Syntactic Research and of a series of Working Papers in Linguistics published at the University of Huelva (Gramática contrastiva inglés-español, Gramática y pragmática, Transitivity revisited, Recent approaches to English grammar, Gramática de construcciones and The historical linguistics-cognitive linguistics interface). She is author of Sintaxis inglesa: la atribución (1991) and Diátesis: alternancias oracionales en la lengua inglesa (1998) (winner of the AEDEAN 1998 award for Studies in Linguistics). She has collaborated in the Diccionario sintáctico del verbo inglés (1996) and published articles and chapters in edited volumes on English grammar and English-Spanish contrastive linguistics. Her most recent publications concentrate on the analysis of different constructions from a contrastive perspective and on the metonymic basis of language.

2nd English Linguistics Circle postgraduate conference

The Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2) was held at the University of Vigo (Spain) on 30-31 October 2009. The objective of the conference was to provide linguistics postgraduate students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.
The conference was organised by postgraduate students from the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. It was supported by these two universities and by the English Linguistics Circle, a research network involving the following research teams:
- Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalisation (VLCG; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Prof. Teresa Fanego),
- Spoken English Research Team at the University of Santiago de Compostela (SPERTUS; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios Martínez),
- Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC; University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez Guerra),
- Methods and Materials for the Teaching and Acquisition of Foreign Languages (MMTAFL, University of Vigo; Director: Marta Dahlgren-Thorsell).
ELC2 was honoured to receive three internationally recognised plenary speakers: Terence Odlin, from Ohio State University, Geoff Thompson, from the University of Liverpool, and María José López-Couso, from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
The conference delegates came from many different universities, located both in Spain and elsewhere. There were speakers from the Spanish universities of Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Seville, Pablo de Olavide in Seville, and the Balearic Islands; the international universities were represented by Hong Kong, Poitiers, Bamberg, Freiburg, Essex, the University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska in Lublin and the American universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Louisiana at Lafayette. The various papers covered a wide range of topics: morphology, syntax, phonetics, lexis, semantics, pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Second Language Acquisition, and many others.
The English Linguistics Circle was also responsible for ELC1, a former edition of the International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics held in Santiago de Compostela in May 2008. A refereed volume containing a selection of the papers presented at ELC1 will be published as New trends and methodologies in applied English language research. Diachronic, diatopic and contrastive studies (Linguistic Insights Series; Bern: Peter Lang).