María José Rodríguez Espiñeira
Full professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Spanish Language and Literature, Literary Theory and General Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela since June 2008
As a member of the research group Spanish Grammar (GdE) she was actively involved in the design and construction of the Syntactic Database of Spanish (BDS) and the different competitive projects related with this line of research from 1989 to 2006. Her first publications (1985-1992) are related to the topic of her doctoral dissertation, defended in 1989, and concern secondary predications: accusative-and-infinitive, appositive adjectives, lexical aspect and habitual predications, and the information structure of object complements, among others. From 1992 onward, starting from the BDS data, her publications analyse various aspects of functional constituents of the clause: the complementizer use of como, the causative construction dejar + infinitive, intensive clauses versus passives, direct and indirection perception, passive and impersonal constructions, nominal and verbal infinitives. Within the framework of the BDME-TIP project, the publications focused on nominal subcategories, such as event nouns and shell nouns, on adjectives, among which the relational type. Since 2008 she has been interested in modality and, more specifically, in different construction types that express epistemic modality, such as puede que, the adjectives posible and probable with a clausal subject, the constructions capaz que / capaz de plus infinitive, the reduced parenthetical clause si cuadra (calque from Galician se cadra, equivalent of Portuguese se calhar), which has an epistemic function in the sense of maybe in Galician Spanish.
Since 2009 she has been part of the team that developed a morphological database of Spanish (BDME) and participated in the design of the web application that visualizes the morpho-etymological relationships of family words (BDME-TIP). The work on this database was funded by three competitive research projects (2009-2016) and by a collaborative agreement with the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) from 2017 to 2020 (RAE-USC-ULPG). The results are available on line and queries can be made without prior registration from 2024 onward. In 2008 she coordinated a project funded by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), in which three researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and three from the USC collaborated, with focus on syntactic and discourse aspects of modal and evaluative adjectives. She has been the leading researcher in two competitive projects: one coordinated with the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) (2004-2007) and another regional one financed by the Xunta de Galicia (2010-2013).
Since 2011 she has been editor-in-chief of the journal Verba. Anuario Galego de Filoloxía