Laura Abalo-Dieste holds a BA in Foreign Languages (2020) from the University of Vigo (Spain), which included a semester-abroad at the University of Osnabrück (Germany) within the ERASMUS programme (March-September 2019). She also completed an MA in Advanced English Studies (2021) (linguistics specialisation) at the University of Vigo, with a Master’s Thesis on ‘Fragmentary constructions as proxies for colloquialisation in Present-Day written English’ (supervisor: Prof. Javier Pérez-Guerra). In October 2021, she joined the PhD programme in Advanced English Studies at the same university. Her dissertation is framed within the research lines of the ‘Language Variation and Textual Categorisation’ (LVTC) research group in Vigo, particularly within its project “Fragments: Constructionalising non-canonical expressions in written English” (funded by the Spanish Research Agency, grant no. PID2020-117541GB-I00).

As a predoctoral researcher, Laura has carried out two research stays, one of 35 days (September-October 2021) at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL; The Netherlands), under the supervision of Dr. María Carmen Parafita Couto, and another of 91 days (February-May 2022) at the English Language and Linguistics Department of Lancaster University (UK) under the supervision of Dr. Vaclav Brezina. She also participated in two summer schools of Corpus Linguistics in 2022, organised by the University of Birmingham (UK) and Lancaster University (UK), specialization in statistics and data visualization.

Publications:

Abalo-Dieste, Laura & Javier Pérez-Guerra. 2021. Passivisation and relativisation as colloquialisation strategies in Present-Day English: a corpus-based study. In Proceedings of the International Conference ‘Corpus Linguistics-2021’. July 1-3, 2021, 56-64. St. Petersburg: Scythia. ISSN 2412-9623. ISBN 978-5-98620-557-1.

Conference presentations:

(2022) “Screening colloquialisation strategies in the recent diachrony”. 45th International Conference of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN). University of Extremadura (Spain).

(2022) “Colloquialisation and informality: A corpus-driven taxonomy of linguistic features”. 13th International Conference of Corpus Linguistics (CILC2022). University of Bergamo (Italy).

(2022) “Fragments as proxies for colloquialisation in contemporary English”. 4th Seminar in English Studies (IV SEING 2022). University of Zaragoza (Spain).

(2021) “Passivisation and relativisation as colloquialisation strategies in Present-Day English: A corpus-based study”. International Conference ‘Corpus Linguistics–2021’. St Petersburg University (Russia).

(2021) “Fragmentary constructions as proxies for colloquialisation in Present-Day written English”. 12th International Conference of Corpus Linguistics (CILC2021). University of Murcia (Spain).

(2021) “Passivisation and relativisation as colloquialisation strategies in Present-Day English: A corpus-based study”. 38th International Conference of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (AESLA). University of A Coruña (Spain).

National and international projects:

(01/09/2018-31/08/2023) Project Uniformity vs variability in Spanish/English code-switching (IP: M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Universities of Leiden and Vigo). Contribution: codification and development of a bilingual Spanish-English corpus for the analysis of bilingual practices in the Gibraltar community, comparable to other communities with the same language pair.

(01/09/2021-31/08/2024) Project Fragments: Constructionalising non-canonical expressions in written English (PID2020-117541GB-I00) (IP: Javier Pérez-Guerra, University of Vigo; 60.500€). Contribution: compilation of a database, statistical analyses and characterisation of ‘fragments’ as proxies for stylistic change in English.

(01/01/2021-20/11/2024) Consolidation and organisation of competitive research units – research group ‘Language Variation and Textual Categorisation’ (GRC-ED431C 2021/52; Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidade) (IP: Javier Pérez Guerra, University of Vigo; 200.000€). Contribution: support to the research lines of the group.

(01/03/2022-31/07/2022) Project Policy, practice and perceptions: addressing the gender-gap in Liverpool’s schoolchildren writing (IP: Victorina González-Díaz, University of Liverpool). Contribution: syntactic analysis of samples of narrative and argumentative writing by English children in primary education in 1979.

Research contracts:

(1st March – 31st July 2022) Research contract for the project Policy, practice and perceptions: addressing the gender-gap in Liverpool’s schoolchildren writing (IP: Victorina González-Díaz, University of Liverpool). Contribution: syntactic analysis of samples of narrative and argumentative writing by English children in primary education in 1979.

(1st March – 31st August 2022) Research contract for the Language Variation and Textual Categorisation research group (LVTC; IP: Javier Pérez Guerra, University of Vigo). Contribution: Compilation of (semi-)automatic queries in electronic corpora and retrieval of fragmentary constructions in Present-Day British English.

(1st September – 30th November 2021) Research contract for the Language Variation and Textual Categorisation research group (LVTC; IP: Javier Pérez Guerra, University of Vigo). Contribution: retrieval of colloquialisation strategies in contemporary English from electronic corpora through (semi-)automatic search strings.

Awards:

(15/06/2022) Award to academic excellence for students starting a PhD in the academic year 2021/2022. University of Vigo (250€).

R&D activities:

(06-07/10/2022) Member of the organising committee of the International seminar ‘Advancing code-switching research’, University of Vigo (Spain).

Research grants:

(2022) Research grant AEDEAN Patricia Shaw, AEDEAN Association (800€).

(2022) Mobility grant for PhD students, University of Vigo (3.000€).

Languages:

(29/07/2021) English, C2 (July 2021. Cambridge Assessment English. Proficiency -Level 3 Certificate in ESOL International)

(02/05/2017) German, A2 (May 2017. Official School of Languages (EOI from Vilagarcía de Arousa -B2 MCER)

(14/07/2022) Galician, C1 MCER (July 2015. Celga 4. Secondary school IES Fermín Bouza Brey)