Lucía Loureiro-Porto

Lucía Loureiro-Porto obtained her MA in English Language and Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela in June 1998. From September 1998 to June 1999 she taught Spanish at Reed College (Portland, Oregon). In October 1999 she was admitted to the PhD Programme in English Linguistics at the University of Santiago de Compostela and in October 2001 she started working as a researcher funded by the Autonomous Government of Galicia. Her MA dissertation, submitted in January 2002, was honored with the Extraordinary Award, and in December 2004 she received an AEDEAN grant for junior investigators to complete her PhD, which she publicly defended in June 2005. After a brief period at the Ramón Piñeiro Institute for Research in the Humanities she moved to the Department of Spanish and Modern and Classical Languages of the University of the Balearic Islands, where she holds a position as tenured Senior Lecturer (as from September 2011).

Lucía teaches Introduction to English Linguistics (undergraduate, 2nd year), English Lexicology (undergraduate, 2nd year), English Grammar (undergraduate, 3rd year) and a postgraduate course on language variation and change. After some years devoted to historical linguistics (within the Research Unit for Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization), her main current research interests are the study of morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes, the expression of modality, with special reference to the degree of grammaticalization of (emerging) modal verbs, and colloquialization, democratization and Americanization as factors accounting for ongoing changes in World Englishes (within the Project Variation in English Worldwide). She was also the linguistic advisor to the study of resilience in language dynamics that was carried out at IFISC (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems) within the European Project PATRES, funded by the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission (2007-2010).

Lucía has held visiting positions at the Department of Linguistics of the University of California at Santa Barbara (summer of 2007), the Department of English of the University of Freiburg (June-July 2009), the Department of Linguistics of the University of Leuven (January-February 2010), and at the University of Tübingen (July 2010). In May 2011 she was a guest speaker at the symposium Complexity in Language: Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives, organized by Alain Peyraube and Salikoko S. Mufwene at the University of Lyon 2.

Lucía is on the editorial board of the scholarly journal Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos and also on the board of reviewers of Transactions of the Philological Society. She also has experience in the organization of research meetings, such as the workshop "Modelling language contact: linguistic data and interdisciplinary approaches" which she convened, jointly with Johannes Kabatek (Tübingen), at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (Vilnius, Lithuania, 2-5 September 2010). Recently she has joined the ICE (International Corpus of English) project: together with Elena Seoane (UVigo) and Cristina Suárez (UIB), Lucía is involved in the compilation of ICE Gibraltar.

In August 2010 LucÍa's monograph The semantic predecessors of need in the history of  English (c750-1710) (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) received the ESSE 2010 Book Award in the category of English Language and Linguistics.