Introduction
Ricardo Mairal has been a Full Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages at the Spanish National Distance-Learning University (UNED) since 2002. His main areas of research interest are the architecture of the English lexicon, the representation of lexical knowledge, linguistic universals and the interactions between lexical semantics, syntax and morphology with particular reference to theoretical models, both formal and functional. He has been the head of various research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Regional Government of Madrid and has additionally participated in other projects that deal with various aspects of language research such as terminology, the compilation of lexical representations and linking mechanisms in Old English, natural language processing and the development of lexical databases for lexicography. He has co-authored or co-edited a number of books including: Nuevas perspectivas en Gramática Funcional (Ariel, 1999), Constructing a lexicon of English verbs (Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), New perspectives on argument structure in Functional Grammar (Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), En torno a los universales lingüísticos (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Linguistic Universals (Cambridge University Press). He has also published over fifty scholarly articles which have appeared in specialised national and international journals. He has served as a scientific committee member for several specialised journals, including Cuadernos de Investigación Filología, Atlantis, RESLA, Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, Onomázein and Functions of Language. He has done occasional review work for Cognitive Linguistics and Language Sciences and has also been a member of the advisory committee of various international conferences on Role and Reference Grammar. He has also lectured extensively as keynote speaker at national and international conferences on Applied and Theoretical Linguistics.
He is one of the co-founders of the LEXICOM research group (www.lexicom.es). His recent research has concentrated on the design of a multilingual and multifunctional lexical conceptual knowledge base for natural language processing applications (www.fungramkb.com).