Research Interests

The major areas of research I have worked on are related to the application of Corpus Linguistics methods to the analysis of language from different perspectives and at various levels. In the last years, my interest has shifted from quantitative methodologies and techniques to their application to corpus-based discourse analysis.

On the one hand, Corpus Linguistics (CL) allows the researcher to examine large language samples, which could not be studied in such detail using a traditional method, and draw conclusions on them using a bottom-up approach and adopting, unlike prescriptive grammar, a descriptive angle. My main area of specialisation is English for Specific Purposes (ESP), specifically legal English, and terminology, both of which have been discussed throughout my work applying CL techniques. This is why an 8.85 million-word legal English corpus was compiled for my doctoral thesis, owing to the scarceness and lack of availability of this type of corpora. It can be consulted on two open-access platforms such as Tom Cobb's Lextutor (http://lextutor.ca/conc/eng) and the FLAX, an interactive language learning platform designed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand (http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax;jsessionid=DE369A245D66E2A988293741422F73F9?a=fp&sa=collAbout&c=BlaRC&if=). It is also available on A. Kilgarriff's Sketchengine, although this platform requires a subscription.

Apart from the lexical level of legal language, which provides key information on the real usage of language in such a specialised environment, I have also dedicated part of my work to the study of ESP teaching and the proposal of new activities to complement more traditional teaching methods based on textbooks (see Marín, M.J. (2014). “A Proposal to Exploit Legal Term Repertoires Extracted Automatically from a Legal English Corpus”. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 49. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza).

At present, I am implementing CL techniques in combination with other theoretical frameworks such as systemic linguistics or sentiment analysis to the study of literary discourse, as I have become interested in gender studies within the field of literature and translation.