2 June 2021: The Governing Council of the Spanish Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) awarded me an Honorary Doctorate in Philology. My sponsor was Prof. Laura Alba-Juez, UNED's Vice-Rector for International Relations. The entire solemn ceremony
of investiture can be watched here (1 hour 40 minutes). And here is a short (6 minutes) television programme about the event that was broadcast on TVE2.
Activities as Treasurer of SLE
As Treasurer of the Societas Linguistica Europæa (2017-2023), I was involved in the organization of SLE's annual meetings. The last of these was held in Athens (29 August - 1 September 2023), with over 600 attendees. Future conferences will be held in Helsinki (21 to 24 August 2024) and Bordeaux (2025).
Participation in Conferences and Workshops
4-5 May 2022: Workshop on Emotion Processes in Discourse, together with Laura Alba-Juez (UNED, Spain), organized as part of the Congreso Internacional sobre Emociones, Discursos y Argumentación at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico).
9-10 June 2022: Invited speaker at the workshop Current Approaches to Morphosyntax at the Interfaces, Universidad de Oviedo (Spain); my title: 'Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) as a grammar of the Discourse Act'.
25 June 2022: Invited plenary lecture, given in English on 'Recent advances in Functional Discourse Grammar', to the online conference VI SILF - Simpósio Internacional de Linguística Funcional, the sixth in a series of biennial events.
3 November 2022: Invited online opening lecture 'GDF: avanços e desdobramentos' for the Seminário de 20 anos do GPGF, celebrating 20 years of research into Functional Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar by the GPGF group at Unesp-São João do Rio Preto SP, Brazil.
12 May 2023: 'Basic negation is highest negation?', presentation to FDG Online lectures.
13-14 July 2023: 'Contrast facilitates predictive processing', paper for the International Workshop on Linearization in Functional Discourse Grammar (IW-FDG-2023).
26 September 2023 (14.00 São Paulo time): '"Eu não atendo bêbado": Ambiguidade, eficiência e gramática'; invited talk in the framework of the online event 'Diálogos com Maria Helena Moura Neves', organized in memory of the great Brazilian linguist by the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brazil.
Lecture to Abralin ao Vivo
On 9 June 2020, I gave a talk "Gramática Discursivo-Funcional: Reflexões desde o autoisolamento" to Abralin ao Vivo. It can be viewed here.
Organization of Workshops, etc.
13, 17, 20, 24, 27 September 2021: Postgraduate course on the e-learning platform of the Brazilian Linguistics Association: "Pragmatics through the prism of FDG".
29 August-2 September 2022: Co-ordination of the 2022 ESSE Doctoral Symposium for PhD students in English Language & Linguistics, Literatures in English, and Cultural & Area Studies at the University of Mainz (Germany).
24-25 August 2023: Co-ordination of the 2023 ESSE Doctoral Symposium at the University of Milan (Italy).
26-30 August 2024: Co-ordination of the 2024 ESSE Doctoral Symposium at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Future Doctoral Symposia are planned for Valletta (2025) and Santiago de Compostela (2026).
Prize
The "Premio de Investigación AESLA 'Rafael Monroy' para investigadores experimentados" was awarded to a book I co-edited with María de los Ángeles Gómez González
in 2018, The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 296, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins). The prize was presented on 28 March 2019 during the 37th International Conference of the Spanish Society for Applied Linguistics, held in Valladolid (Spain).
Past Distinctions
On 8 October 2004 I was the recipient of the Festschrift:
Aertsen, H., M. Hannay and R. Lyall (eds), 2004. Words in their places: A Festschrift for J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Amsterdam: VU University Amsterdam.
On 2 April 2007 another Festschrift in my honour was published:
I was awarded a Giner de los Rios fellowship to spend two months (February and March 2009) at the University of Alcalá (Spain) as a consultant for a project on autonomous learning and lexical acquisition.
From 15 September to 15 December 2012 I worked, thanks to a grant for prestigious researchers from the Banco Santander, as a consultant for the Research Group ACTUALing in the Faculty of Philology at UNED, the Spanish National University of Distance Education in Madrid (Spain).
