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.

The unit has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund and other authorities and organizations, as follows:

• 01/08/1991-01/08/1994: Spanish Ministry for Education and Culture (grant PB90-0370 / €15.025). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 01/08/1995-01/08/1998: Spanish Ministry for Education and Culture (grant PB94-0619 / €18.030). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 01/10/1998-01/10/2001: Spanish Ministry for Education and Culture (grant PB97-0507 / €19.532). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 01/08/2001-01/08/2004: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant PGIDT01PXI20404PR / €37.142). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 28/12/2001-27/12/2004: Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology (grant BFF2001-2914 / €48.519 + 1 four-year research position). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 14/08/2002-13/08/2005: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant PGIDIT02PXIC20402PN / €20.621). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 28/12/2004-27/12/2007: Spanish Ministry for Education and Science (grant HUM2004-00940 / €77.920 + 1 four-year research position). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 12/07/2005-12/07/2008: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant PGIDIT05PXIC20401PN / €21.100). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 20/12/2006-19/12/2008: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2006-14-0 / €73.125). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 01/03/2007-28/02/2008: Spanish Ministry for Education and Science & Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2006-19 / €34.000). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 01/01/2008-31/12/2010: Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2008-047 / €150.000). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 02/08/2008-01/08/2011: Autonomous Government of Galicia (INCITE grant 08PXIB204016PR / €33.810). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 01/01/2009-31/12/2010: funding from the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant 2009-047 / €120.000) for the network "Corpus design and annotation". Principal Investigator: Guillermo Rojo
• 01/10/2007-30/09/2012: Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (CONSOLIDER grant HUM2007-60706 / €121.000 + 1 four-year research position). Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 01/01/2011-31/12/2012: renewed funding from the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grant CN2011-011 / €120.000) for the research network "English Linguistics Circle". Principal Investigator: Teresa Fanego
• 31/12/2011-31/12/2014: funding from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation for the projects “Constructionalization and grammaticalization in English” (grant FFI2011-26693-C02-01 / €108.900 + 1 four-year research position) and “Morphosyntactic variation in New Englishes” (grant FFI2011-26693-C02-02 / €27.830). These projects will be carried out in coordination at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela (Principal Investigator: María José López-Couso) and the Balearic Islands (Principal Investigator: Cristina Suárez-Gómez).

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 Pécs (16 ICEHL) and Leuven (NRG4), respectively.

We regularly collaborate with other colleagues and departments engaged in research on grammaticalization, historical linguistics and corpus linguistics, and are partners in the following research projects and consortia:

2006-present, under grants 2006/14-0, 2008/047 and CN2011/011 from the Autonomous Government of Galicia: research network English Linguistics Circle, involving our team 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).

2007-present, under CONSOLIDER grant HUM2007-60706: joint project on "Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization" 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).

2008-2011, under INCITE grants 08PXIB204016PR/1 and 08PXIB204016PR/2: joint project, with the team Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez-Guerra), on "Constructionalization in the history of English: syntactic and cognitive perspectives".

2009-2010, under grant 2009/047 from the Autonomous Government of Galicia: network Corpus Design and Annotation, together with eight other research groups from the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña and Vigo. The network was coordinated by Guillermo Rojo, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

2009-present, under British Academy Research Grant SG-101087: partner in 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 (Northern Arizona) and Edward Finegan (Southern California) in the early 1990s. For further information on this project see the entry ARCHER on this website.

2010-present: partner in LingNet Europe (Network of Centres for Linguistics and Research Groups in Europe). This network involves research teams from the Universities of Antwerp, Bern, Bolzano, Freiburg, Fribourg, Leuven, Newcastle 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.