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Department of English and German
Faculty of Philology
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, SPAIN
Office: 413
E-mail: mjlopez.couso@usc.gal
Phone: +34 881 811 891
Portal da Investigación USC
María José López-Couso is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and Coordinator of the VLCG Research Unit. She obtained an MA in English Language and Literature from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in 1986 and a PhD in English Linguistics in 1994. Her doctoral dissertation, supervised by Teresa Fanego, examined aspects of the syntax of John Dryden.
Her research focuses on language variation and change, with particular interests in constructionalization, grammaticalization, (inter)subjectification, clausal complementation, existential constructions, epistemicity and evidentiality, pragmatic markers, parentheticals, and hypercharacterization.
She is actively involved in the training of early-career researchers, having supervised 10 doctoral dissertations to date, with two more currently underway, and mentored predoctoral researchers supported by regional and national funding programmes.
Throughout her career, she has carried out research and taught at several European universities and research centres, including Edinburgh, Freiburg, Glasgow, Helsinki, Jaén, Málaga, Manchester, Munich, Murcia, Oslo, University College London, and Vigo. She has also delivered several invited lectures at academic institutions across Europe (such as the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) and plenary talks at major international conferences, including New Reflections on Grammaticalization 5 (Edinburgh, 2012) and 18th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Leuven, 2014).
María José has served as Principal Investigator of several competitive research projects funded by regional and national agencies, with a particular focus on grammaticalization and constructionalization in the history of English. She has also organized major international conferences, including the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization (NRG 3, 2005), the 34th International Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME 34, 2013), and the 8th Conference of the Internacional Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE 8, 2025).
In addition, she has extensive experience in academic publishing and editorial service. She was co-editor of Research in Corpus Linguistics, the official journal of the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics), and currently serves on the editorial boards of Babel-AFIAL and Atlantis, the official journal of the Spanish Association for English and American Studies.
Beyond her research activities, she has held several senior leadership positions at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, including Dean of the Faculty of Philology (2012–2020) and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Degrees and Internationalization (2020–2025). She also served as Vice-President for Research of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) from 2021 to 2025.
19-20 November 2026: “Beyond that and zero: Hypercharacterization at work in the expansion of the declarative complementizer paradigm in English”, II Conferencia Internacional de Investigación en Linguas (CIIL2026), University of Vigo.
5-7 November 2026: “Expanding the inventory of see-based parentheticals: Evidence from American English” [with Belén Méndez-Naya], 7th Conference of the American Pramatics Association (AMPRA-7), live-broadcast online event.
23-25 September 2026: “Ways of seeing: On the stance parentheticals as I see it and (the) way I see it in American English” [with Belén Méndez-Naya], 7th International Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change Conference (DiPVaC 7), University of Salzburg (Austria).
15-18 June 2026: “Stance parentheticals with the verb see in American English: A constructional network” [with Belén Méndez-Naya], 23rd International Conference on English Historical Linguistics(ICEHL-23), University of Milan (Italy).
29 May 2026: “Humanidades Dixitais aplicadas ao estudo da variación e o cambio lingüístico: O proxecto Construcións e construcionalización en inglés histórico e contemporáneo” [poster; with Belén Méndez-Naya, Cristina Blanco-García, Zeltia Blanco-Suárez, Tamara Bouso, Teresa Fanego, Jorge Fernández-Avilés, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo & Amira Oumouna], III Xeira CLARIAH-GAL, University of Santiago de Compostela.
12-14 November 2025: “Parentheticals and epistemic stance: Tracing the evolution of (the) way I see it” [with Belén Méndez-Naya], 48th AEDEAN Conference, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz.
9 May 2025: “Contribuíndo ao avance das Humanidades Dixitais: Recursos para o estudo do inglés histórico e contemporáneo” [poster; with Zeltia Blanco-Suárez, Tamara Bouso, Teresa Fanego, Fátima Faya, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo & Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras], II Xeira CLARIAH-GAL, University of Santiago de Compostela.
6-8 November 2024: “Clausal complementation with impersonal look: Complementizer variation in focus” [with Belén Méndez-Naya], 47th AEDEAN Conference, Pablo de Olavide University, Seville.
26-28 September 2024: “Study finds, experts warn: Conveying evidentiality in Contemporary American English” [with Belén Méndez-Naya], 10th Biennial Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE), University of Alicante.
18-22 June 2024: “Emerging evidential parentheticals in Contemporary American English: Exploring COCA” [with Belén Méndez-Naya], 45th ICAME Conference, University of Vigo.
