Monserrat Martínez Vázquez delivered a lecture on the syntax and semantics of reaction object constructions (Levin 1993) in English and Spanish. These structures include non-subcategorised objects which express a reaction which is realised by means of the verbal action (Pauline smiled her thanks = ‘Pauline expressed her thanks by smiling’). Fom Talmy (1985) it has been claimed in the literature that Spanish as well as other Romance languages, does not tolerate such fused constructions. Prof Martínez Vázquez has developed an analysis based on the CREA corpus (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) and offered examples which puts some of the previous claims into question.
CV details
Montserrat Martínez Vázquez, Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University Pablo de Olavide in Seville, has held academic and research positions at different Universities (Harvard, Seville, Extremadura, Huelva and Pablo de Olavide). Her main area of research is the analysis of argument structure from a constructional perspective. She is coordinator of a research group on Contrastive Linguistics and has coordinated three linguistics projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. She is editor of the three first volumes of Syntaxis. An International Journal of Syntactic Research and of a series of Working Papers in Linguistics published at the University of Huelva (Gramática contrastiva inglés-español, Gramática y pragmática,Transitivity revisited, Recent approaches to English grammar, Gramática de construcciones and The historical linguistics-cognitive linguistics interface). She is author of Sintaxis inglesa: la atribución (1991) and Diátesis: alternancias oracionales en la lengua inglesa (1998) (winner of the AEDEAN 1998 award for Studies in Linguistics). She has collaborated in the Diccionario sintáctico del verbo inglés (1996) and published articles and chapters in edited volumes on English grammar and English-Spanish contrastive linguistics. Her most recent publications concentrate on the analysis of different constructions from a contrastive perspective and on the metonymic basis of language.
