Irune Fernández Montes
Irune Fernández Montes is pursuing a PhD in English Linguistics at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). She graduated in English Studies from UCM in 2022, earning three distinctions. In 2023, she obtained her master’s degree in English Linguistics: New Applications and International Communication from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her master’s thesis was a cross-cultural study of apologies, with a special focus on pragmatics.
Before starting her undergraduate studies, Irune completed a higher degree in Sociocultural Animation and Tourism. During this time, she participated in an Erasmus+ program for three months, funded by Ikaslan Gipuzkoa. She completed her Erasmus+ internship at the Edina Tours tourism office in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Professionally, Irune has experience as a substitute English teacher at IES María de Molina (Madrid, 2019, hired by a private company). She also worked as a private English tutor from 2019 to 2022.
Irune is currently working on her thesis, provisionally entitled “A Cognitive Approach to Multimodal Creative Constructions”, under the supervision of Dr. Carmen Maíz Arévalo and Dr. Mario Serrano Losada. Her research primarily involves Construction Grammar (CxG), adopting a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural approach. More precisely, her study focuses on a trilingual (English, Spanish and Euskera / Basque) comparison of multimodal constructions.
Recently, Irune has joined the INNOVA project “¿Qué (no) sabemos sobre la diversidad lingüística? Herramientas para fomentar la inclusión y la diversidad”, for the academic year 2024-2025 (continuation from 23-24). The person responsible for the project is Dr. Iván Tamaredo Meira.
Conferences:
Contributions:
- EPICS XI International Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive, and Social Pragmatics (May 22-24, 2024) at Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville: Irune presented her research “A Cross-Cultural Approach to Apologies: The Cases of peninsular Spanish and Anglospheric Cultures” (supervised by Dr. Carmen Maíz Arévalo).
Additional activities:
- UPCEL 5th International UCM Predoctoral Conference on English Linguistics (January 23-24, 2024) at Universidad Complutense de Madrid: She participated as a student assistant.
Her main areas of interest include cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies.
Please feel free to contact her at irunefer@ucm.es