Latest News
We are proud and delighted to announce that, additional to the award from the Autonomous Government of Galicia of research funding to the tune of €55,566, a SCIMITAR application has, we have just heard, been successful in acquiring €100,000 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Maite Taboada in currently benefiting from a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to work on parsing discourse relations in multimodal material with Professors Christopher Habel and Juliane House at the University of Hamburg, Germany for the period 1/4/2010 to 31/12/2010.
Christopher S. Butler has been appointed Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom) and also Visiting Professor at the University of Huddersfield (also United Kingdom).
María de los Ángeles Gómez-González is on the Scientific Committee of the 6th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference to be held in Berlin (Germany) from 30 September to 2 October 2010 and, together with Maite Taboada, is there convening the thematic section 'Discourse analysis and contrastive linguistics: From research to applications'. SCIMITAR will be well represented there with a large number of papers.
Upcoming Events
24-28/8/2010 - Lachlan Mackenzie and Francisco Gonzálvez-García are participating actively in the ESSE 10 Conference in Turin (Italy) as co-convenors, discussants and presenters.
9-11/9/2010 - María de los Ángeles Gómez González is on the Scientific Committee of the conference Modality in English 4 in Madrid (Spain).
Newest Publications
- Gonzálvez García, F. 2009. The family of object-related depictives in English and Spanish: towards a usage-based constructionist analysis. Language Sciences 31 (5). 663-723.
- Hengeveld, K. and J.L. Mackenzie, 2010. Functional Discourse Grammar. In B. Heine and H. Narrog (eds), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 367-400.
- Mackenzie, J.L., 2010. More tiles on the roof: further thoughts on incremental language production. In K. Boye & E. Engberg-Pedersen (eds), Language usage and language structure. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 263-293.
- Taboada, M. 2009. Implicit and explicit coherence relations. In J. Renkema (ed.) Discourse, Of Course. Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA: Benjamins. 127-140.
- Taboada, M. and L. Wiesemann (2010). Subjects and topics in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 42(7). 1816-1828.
Meet a Member of SCIMITAR!
Lachlan Mackenzie was a Lecturer and then a Full Professor in English Language for 27 years at VU University Amsterdam. He now works as a Consultant
in Languages and Linguistics as well as being Honorary Professor of Functional Linguistics at VU University. He is Research Manager of SCIMITAR, and is also a Researcher at the Instituto de Linguística Teórica e Computacional (ILTEC) in Lisbon, his
main place of residence. His primary research interest is in Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), and in 2008 published, together with Kees Hengeveld, a major presentation of that theory with Oxford University Press.
He has also co-edited a number of books with other members of SCIMITAR, and is co-author of two books on advanced writing skills; in addition, he has written a considerable number of academic articles.
Welcome!
SCIMITAR is a forum for international cooperation among researchers oriented to the study of the interface between grammar and discourse.
The methods used are strongly contrastive. We work on the intralinguistic comparison of different varieties of English, and cross-linguistic comparison of English with other languages, notably Spanish.
The tools used are primarily those of corpus and computational linguistics, and the approaches taken include Functional Discourse Grammar, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Rhetorical Structure Theory, Construction Grammar, and the Lexical Constructional Model.