QLVL members - Andrea Pizarro Pedraza
Andrea Pizarro Pedraza completed a 5-year BA degree in Spanish Language and Literature (Hispanic Philology) in the University Complutense in Madrid in 2005, with various scholarships from the Ministry of Education, and from the Spanish National Research Center (CSIC). In 2006 she got a Postgraduate Certificate in Education and worked as Editor of French and Spanish for a major Spanish publishing house. In the meantime, she completed an MA program (DEA) in Spanish Linguistics in the University Complutense. Since 2009 she holds a PhD scholarship from the Spanish National Research Center (CSIC). She has been a Visiting Student at the University of Essex (2010), and the University of Leuven (2011) where she is now enrolled in a Joint PhD Program.
E-mail: andrea.pizarro@cchs.csic.es
Fax: ++32 16 32 47 67
Surface mail: Department of Linguistics, Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 PO
Box 03308, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium
Office: room 02.39 of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven
Research
Andrea?s PhD Thesis is an experimental study aimed at establishing the Sociolinguistics of Sexual Taboo in Madrid. She is particularly interested in combining the newest trends in Sociolinguistic studies with the research on lexical and semantic variation developed in QLVL, as a solution for the lack of methodological proposals in that particular linguistic level in the sociolinguistic tradition. For that purpose, she has collected a corpus of oral interviews in two districts of Madrid based on the topic of sex. The edition is now at its final stage and will be ready for its study in the next weeks.
The thesis will consist in a series of case studies in order to determine the semantic strategies (metaphor, metonymy, vague language...) used by the informants to utter the taboo concepts in a constraining communicative situation like an interview. This will be subsequently studied together with the sociolinguistic variables of the informants, in order to elucidate the social meaning in the variation of the expression of sexual concepts in the corpus.
During the collection of the corpus, Andrea has developed some pilot studies on the expression of particular concepts (abortion, menstruation) in different genres and different historical periods on available corpora. She is also very interested in the relations between Language and Emotions, Language and Stance, and the manipulation of meanings in discourse.
She has presented her works on a number of international conferences.
