My name is María Teresa and I am a first-year PhD candidate in English Linguistics at Complutense University of Madrid, under the joint supervision of Dr. María Ángeles Martínez Martínez and Dr. Paloma Tejada Caller. Prior to joining the programme, I completed my Undergraduate Degree in English Studies from the University of Salamanca and obtained a MSt in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, Merton College, where I was previously an undergraduate visiting student on an Erasmus+ Scholarship.

My research focuses on the analysis of dialogues and the linguistic strategies responsible for the development of character and emotion in selected works of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. This topic initially derives from my undergraduate dissertation, entitled "Emotion through Language Codification in Shakespearean Tragedies", in which I attempted to pin down the emotional impact provoked by the interplay of language production and interpretation among the main characters in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.

Throughout my current research, I therefore intend to combine notions of cognitive literary linguistics, pragmatics, narratology and corpus stylistics as theoretical and methodological frameworks, in order to obtain a functional picture of encoded, discursive universes at the service of emotion, characterisation and subsequent action in fiction.