About SCIMITAR

SCIMITAR is a forum for international cooperation among researchers oriented to the study of the interface between grammar and discourse in present-day English. 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.

Our research concentrates on three areas:

  1. the mapping out of functional-cognitive space, i.e. the systematic comparison of the various approaches taken to language analysis;
  2. the study, from descriptive and acquisitional perspectives, of various constructions in English (clefts/pseudoclefts, preposings, postposings and inversions) and their role in reflecting local coherence and subjectivity in different text types;
  3. a global or macrotextual analysis of the use of these and other mechanisms for the communication of feelings, i.e. with regard to the coherent construction of the expressive function in language.

SCIMITAR History

SCIMITAR has existed since 2002, when it was set up by its co-ordinator, Prof. Dr. María de los Ángeles Gómez González. The immediate goal of this international group was to carry out a research project funded by the then Spanish Ministry of Education, the Xunta de Galicia and the Fund for Regional Development. This project was concerned with describing the orthographic, phonetic-phonological and grammatical characteristics of the English language and characterizing difficulties in the acquisition of discourse structures in English as a Second Language (especially by native speakers of Spanish and Galician). The project ran from 2002 to 2005 and was evaluated extremely favourably. The collaborators in the project worked together with face-to-face meetings in various locations, but the main tools for this joint effort were e-mail and other electronic forms of cooperation.

This academic work has continued, leading to further favourable evaluations and awards of research funding. It has resulted in a large number of publications. In the period since 2002 the members of the group have published:

  • 26 books
  • 158 articles
  • 19 reviews

In addition, the SCIMITAR group was responsible for three editions of the International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC), which were held in Santiago de Compostela in 2001, 2003 and 2005, and the group still plays an advisory role with respect to more recent ICLCs, which have been held in other locations.

SCIMITAR Funding

The SCIMITAR group has received the following funding:

  • 2011-2013: €121,000 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology for the project Estudio Multidimensional de la Interfaz Gramática-Discurso en Lengua Inglesa II under grant no. FFI2010-19380
  • 2009-2012: €55566 from the Autonomous Government of Galicia for the project Gramática, Discurso e Competencia Comunicativa en Lingua Inglesa: un enfoque multidisciplinar integrado under grant no. INCITE09 204 155 PR
  • 2008-2010: €37182.09 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the European Regional Development Fund under grant no. HUM2007-62220/FILO
  • 2007-2009: €180000 from the Autonomous Government of Galicia under grant no. 2007/000145-0/
  • 2005-2008: €37182.09 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the European Regional Development Fund under grant no. HUM2005-00562/FILO
  • 2003-2005: €33320 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the European Regional Development Fund under grant no. BFF2002-02441
  • 2003-2005: €13000 from the Autonomous Government of Galicia under grant no. PGIDIT03PXIC20403PN
  • 2003-2005: €9000 from the Simon Fraser University (BC, Canada)
  • 2000-2003: €11419 and €13462 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and the European Regional Development Fund under grant nos. BFF2000-1271 and BFF2000-0492 respectively

Other Funding

Other funding awarded to SCIMITAR members:

  • 2010-2013: Funding from the Autonomous Government of Galicia under grant no. FFI2010-17610 for the project "Fundamentos para la construcción del nivel gramatical en el entorno de una base de conocimiento léxico-conceptual" (SCIMITAR participant: Francisco Gonzálvez-García; Principal Researcher: Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez)
  • 2009-2012: €33875 from the Autonomous Government of Galicia under grant no. NCITE O9-204-127-PR for the project "Nos-outras: Discursos das escritoras irlandesas e galegas sobre a extranxeiría" (SCIMITAR participant: María Dolores Gómez Pena)
  • 2008-2013: Can$100,000 from NSREC Discovery Grant to Maite Taboada for "Discourse parsing for summarization and sentiment detection"
  • 2008-2010: €39,000 from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science to Maite Taboada for collaborative research with Julia Lavid and others on "Developing contrastive functional descriptions (English-Spanish) through corpus analysis and annotation"
  • 2007-2009: €20,000 from the Complutense University of Madrid to Maite Taboada for collaborative research with Julia Lavid on "Corpus linguistics and contrastive learning in English and Spanish"
  • 2006-2009: Can$71,147 from SSHRC to Maite Taboada for collaborative research with Manfred Stede of the University of Potsdam (Germany) on "Subject, topic and focus of attention in spoken language"
  • 2004-2010: Can$200,000 from NSERC to Maite Taboada for her research
  • 2004-2008: Can$72,000 from NSERC to Maite Taboada for "Computational analysis of text sentiment"
  • 2004-2006: Can$10,000 from the President's Research Grant to Maite Taboada for research into "Focus and pronominalization in spoken Spanish"

SCIMITAR is centred in the Galician city of Santiago de Compostela, more specifically in the English Department at the University of Santiago de Compostela. This is where the majority of the participants work and it is where the members get together for their regular meetings.

At the same time, Santiago is the hub of a national and international network that includes researchers from the rest of Spain, from Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Portugal.