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The research unit Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization was established in 1990 by Professor
Teresa Fanego and a team of scholars based at the Department of English of the University of Santiago de Compostela. 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.
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):
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 editions of these conferences were held in Munich (15 ICEHL) and Leuven (NRG4), respectively.
We regularly collaborate with other colleagues and departments engaged in research on grammaticalization, historical linguistics and corpus linguistics.
Under CONSOLIDER grant HUM2007-60706 we are working on a joint project with the Functional Linguistics Group of the University of Leuven (Directors: Hubert Cuyckens and Kristin Davidse) and the Chair for English Linguistics of the University of Bamberg (Director: Manfred Krug). Under grants 2006/14-0 and 2008/047 from the Autonomous Government of Galicia we have established the English Linguistics Circle, a research network involving our team and the teams SPERTUS (Spoken English Research at the University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios) and Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez-Guerra). Also in cooperation with the latter team we are carrying out a project on Constructionalization in the history of English: syntactic and cognitive perspectives, under funding from the Directorate General for Research, Development and Innovation of the Autonomous Government of Galicia (INCITE grant 08PXIB204016PR).
Following a meeting held at ICAME30 (Lancaster) on 28 May 2009, we have 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 see the entry ARCHER on this website. Also intimately connected with corpus linguistics is the network Corpus Design and Annotation (grant 2009/047), in which we participate together with eight other research groups from the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña and Vigo; it is coordinated by Guillermo Rojo, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela.
In January 2010 we started cooperation with Peter Auer and the Hermann Paul Centre for Linguistics at the University of Freiburg to establish a small network of centres for linguistics in Europe (LingNet Europe). The foundational meeting took place at FRIAS on 29-30 January and involved research teams from the Universities of Antwerp, Bern, Bolzano, Freiburg, Fribourg, Leuven, Newcastle, York and Santiago de Compostela; we all share an empirical, cognitive-functional outlook on the study of language and communication, with a special emphasis on fields such as language variation, language change, and language typology.
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