Ricardo Mairal Usón

Rector of the UNED  

Ricardo Mairal has been Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Foreign Languages at UNED since 2002. After receiving his PhD from the University of Zaragoza, he taught at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid for four years, from where he moved to the UNED. His teaching activity has focused on semantics, lexicology, syntax and linguistic theory. He has also participated as a guest lecturer in several doctoral programmes at the universities of Córdoba, La Laguna, Castilla La Mancha, Autónoma de Madrid, Valencia, La Rioja, Politécnica de Valencia, Autónoma de Méjico and Pontificia de Chile, among others, and in the doctoral programme in Linguistics at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset. 

He has directed and participated in more than twenty competitive research projects on theoretical linguistics and its applications to knowledge representation, computational linguistics and natural language processing, neurolinguistics and clinical linguistics with a special focus on cognitive deficits associated with neurodegenerative diseases and brain tumour resection. He is co-author and co-editor of the following works: Nuevas perspectivas en Gramática Funcional (Ariel, 1999), a work awarded the Premio Nacional de Investigación en Lingüística Inglesa AEDEAN 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, 2006); El funcionalismo en la teoría lingüística. The Grammar of Role and Reference. Introduction, Advances and Applications (Akal, 2012).   

He is also the author or co-author of more than seventy scientific articles that have been published in both national and international journals. He has participated as a speaker at numerous theoretical and applied linguistics conferences (AESLA, AEDEAN, AELCO, International Role and Reference Grammar Conference, Functional Grammar Conference, etc.); he has given conferences in Germany, Argentina, Chile, the United States, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Beijing, Taiwan, etc. 

He has been president of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics (2011- 2017), co-founder of the research group LEXICOM (www.lexicom.es), director of the Consolidated Research Group ACTUALing (2006-2011). At UNED he has been Director of the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics (1998-2000; 2011-2013), Director of the University Centre for Languages at a Distance (2000-2004), Vice-Rector for Research and Second Vice-Rector (2013-2016) and Vice-Rector for Teaching Staff and Planning and First Vice-Rector (2016-2018). President of EADTU from 2020-2022. Since 2018 he is the Rector of the UNED.