Daniela Pettersson-Traba holds a BA in English Language and Literature (July 2014), an MA in English Studies (September 2015) and a PhD in English Linguistics (March 2021) from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Between 2016 and 2019 she held a competitive three-year postgraduate grant (ref. ED481A-2016/168) from the Regional Government of Galicia, to prepare her doctoral thesis. She has worked (2019–2022) as Lecturer in English at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela, Extremadura, Zaragoza and Autónoma de Madrid; she now holds a tenure-track position as an Assistant Lecturer (‘Ayudante Doctora’) at the Department of English Studies of the Complutense University of Madrid.

Daniela has received the Extraordinary MA Award 2015 from the Faculty of Philology of the University of Santiago de Compostela and the Extraordinary PhD Award 2020–2021 to the best dissertation defended at the USC in the fields of Linguistics, Philology and Philosophy. She has also obtained (2019) the ‘Catalina Montes’ Award to the best paper presented by a postgraduate student at the 43rd AEDEAN International Conference (University of Alicante). Her monograph The development of the concept of SMELL in American English: A usage-based view of near-synonymy (Mouton de Gruyter, 2022) has been honoured with three major book awards: the 2023 Award for Early Career Researchers from AELINCO (Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics), the ‘Leocadio Martín Mingorance’ Book Award 2023 for Theoretical and Applied English Linguistics from AEDEAN (Spanish Association for English and American Studies), and the ESSE 2024 Book Award in English Language and Linguistics – Category B from ESSE (European Society for the Study of English).

As a postgraduate student and postdoc, Daniela has stayed at the Department of English of University College London (April 2016), the Department of Linguistics of KU Leuven (Spring 2017), the Universidade Católica Portuguesa – Centro Regional de Braga (July 2019), and the Complutense University of Madrid (November 2021–February 2022).

Daniela has experience in the organization of conferences such as the VI Encontro da Mocidade Investigadora (12–13 June 2018), sponsored by the International Doctorate School at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the 44th International Congress of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (AESLA 2027; to be held at the Complutense University of Madrid from 12–14 May 2027).

Pettersson-Traba, Daniela, Maria Gkoutziomitrou & Iván Tamaredo. 2026. Language variation in the linguistics classroom: Improving university students’ attitudes through targeted instruction. Journal of English Studies 24. 267-303. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.6883

Serrano-Losada, Mario & Daniela Pettersson-Traba (eds.). 2024. Cognitive approaches to mind, language and society: Theory and description (Special issue of Cognitive Linguistic Studies 11(1). 1-253

Serrano-Losada, Mario & Daniela Pettersson-Traba. 2024. Mind, language and society: Theoretical and descriptive approaches in cognitive linguistics. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 11(1). 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.00109.ser

Pettersson-Traba, Daniela. 2023. Sobre la interrelación entre lengua y sociedad: La industrialización como motor de cambio semántico en el dominio del olfato. Revista Española de Lingüística 53(1). 199-228. https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.53.1.9 

Complete list of publications

1-4 September 2025: “Synthetic or natural? Tracing the semantic evolution of smell-related adjectives in American English”, ISLE8 (8th Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English), University of Santiago de Compostela.

15-17 May 2025: “From intuition to computation: A comparative study of semantic categorization methods” [with Iván Tamaredo], 16th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, University of Salamanca.

2-4 October 2024: “The scent of change: Unveiling the impact of the industrial revolution on olfactory language”, 8th International Conference on Late Modern English, University of Salamanca.

23-25 October 2023: “Open Woodclap and learn: El uso de plataformas digitales para fomentar el aprendizaje activo en el aula universitaria” [poster, with Inés de la Villa Vecilla & Iván Tamaredo]. El papel de las universidades en los objetivos de desarrollo sostenible: innovación docente y experiencias significativas, Complutense University of Madrid. 

10-12 May 2023: De la teoría a los datos y de los datos a la teoría: Aplicaciones estadísticas en lingüística de corpus [Round table with Pascual Cantos, Javier Pérez-Guerra, Yolanda Fernández-Pena & Iván Tamaredo], 14th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics – CILC 2023, University of Oviedo.

16-18 November 2022: “On the interconnection between language and society: Exploring the role of extralinguistic factors in semantic change” and “Mirative extensions in discourse-pragmatic markers: A crosslinguistic study of finally and in the end in the EuroParl Parallel Corpus” [with Mario Serrano-Losada],  45th AEDEAN Conference, University of Extremadura.

27-29 April 2022: “Exploring mirativity: A cross-linguistic approach to English, Spanish and Swedish discourse-pragmatic finally-type adverbials” [with Mario Serrano-Losada], AESLA 2022 (International Conference of the Spanish Association for Applied Linguistics), University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

24-25 January 2022: “Changes in the prototypicality of competing forms: A diachronic collocational analysis”, English on the move: discourse and cognitive-functional approaches to linguistic variation (UPCEL 2022), Complutense University of Madrid.

24-26 November 2021: “A diachronic DCA analysis of the concept PLEASANT SMELLING in American English: Shared tendencies and idiosyncratic patterns”, 44th AEDEAN International Conference, University of Cantabria.

17-18 June 2021: “Synonyms and the company they keep: On the influence of abstract and specific co-occurrence patterns on lexical choice”, ASYRAS 7th Conference: New voices in English studies. ASYRAS VII Conference, online.