Cabeza Pereiro, María del Carmen

Categoryprofessor at a university
Phone number986 81 23 55
OfficeC53
Position
AreaGeneral Linguistics
Emailcabeza@uvigo.gal
Postbox28
Research groupGramática, Discurso e Sociedade (GRADES)
Webhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-8318-9029

Bachelor’s degree final project topics

Linguistics and Spanish sign language (bachelor’s degree Ciencias del Lenguaje y Estudios Literarios)

Teaching

  • V01G181V01114 Linguistics: Linguistics
  • V01G181V01215 Language Technologies
  • V01G430V01222 Language Technologies
  • V01M126V01101 Models and Methods in Current Linguistics
  • V01M126V01208 Learning and Development of Language in the Deaf Community

Related subjects

Any subject related to general linguistics; subjects in the area of sign languages of Deaf communities.

Brief CV

She graduated in Hispanic Philology in 1988 and obtained a PhD in Philology in 1994, in both cases from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. She has been working as a professor at the Universidade de Vigo since 1992, and since 1998 as full professor. She is affiliated with the field of knowledge of general linguistics, and teaches at the faculty of Humanities, Facultade de Filoloxía e Tradución, at bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and PhD levels.

She is currently a member of the research group Gramática, Discurso e Sociedade (GRADES) at the Universidade de Vigo (http://grades.uvigo.es/), a research group recognised by the Xunta de Galicia for its research potential. She has participated in 20 research projects funded by different administrations. She has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator in four projects funded by the Plan General de Conocimiento, a national strategic research funding programme of the Government of Spain. Since 2020, she has been collaborating with the Multimedia Technologies Group (GTM) at the Universidade de Vigo on projects related to the automatic recognition of Spanish sign language. She has supervised three PhD theses (one of them was co-supervised) and she is currently supervising two more. She has three research periods (sexenios).

Her doctoral thesis was about Spanish syntax, specifically on subject complement clauses. Despite this, since the mid-1990s she has been researching about Spanish Sign Language (LSE) used by Deaf people. For several years, her work was focused particularly on the relationship between grammar and discourse based on a linguistic corpus of LSE. This work requires undertaking the arduous task of segmenting and annotating the linguistic units of LSE, in particular signs articulated by both hands, but also non-manual components of utterances: eyebrow, mouth, torso, and gaze movements, which play an important role in LSE discourse. The corpus, called RADIS, also includes grammatical annotations. It is partially accessible through the iSignos platform (https://isignos.uvigo.es/en/). Here users can search for words or phrases and the results show video recordings of the corresponding LSE production, aligned with Spanish translations and with right- and left-hand glosses. Current work focuses on expanding both scope and depth of the annotations available on the platform, as well as providing English translations. Another research line she has developed in sign language linguistics is the exploration of the sociolinguistic situation of the Deaf community in Spain.

She is also interested in the analysis of sexism in language from a perspective that includes grammar, discourse and cognition. She is currently collaborating in JUSTISIGNS2, a European project that explores communication difficulties through interpreters for Deaf people who are victims of gender-based violence, immigrants, or asylum seekers in care settings with the aim of developing training and outreach resources.

Publications