María Victoria Escandell Vidal

María Victoria Escandell Vidal is a professor of linguistics at the Complutense University of Madrid known for her research in semantics, pragmatics and their interfaces.

Education and career Escandell-Vidal studied at the Complutense University of Madrid, receiving her first degree in 1983 and her doctorate in 1989. In 2007 she was promoted to full professor of linguistics at the National University of Distance Education, and in 2020 she returned to the Complutense University of Madrid as full professor. In 2022 she was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Research Escandell-Vidal works on pragmatics, semantics, prosody, and the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interfaces. She has investigated topics in information structure, verbal tense–aspect–mood, evidentiality, politeness theory, language processing, and second-language learning, among others, with a primary empirical focus on the Romance languages Spanish, Catalan and Italian.

Selected publications Escandell-Vidal, Victoria. 1996. Towards a cognitive approach to politeness. Language Sciences 18, 629–650. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria. 1998. Politeness: A relevant issue for relevance theory. Revista alicantina de estudios ingleses 11, 45–57. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria, and Manuel Leonetti. 2002. Coercion and the stage/individual distinction. In Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), From words to discourse, 159–179. Leiden: Brill. Escandell-Vidal, Victoria. 2006. Introducción a la pragmática (Introduction to pragmatics). Madrid: Grupo Planeta. Leonetti, Manuel, and Victoria Escandell-Vidal. 2009. Fronting and verum focus in Spanish. In Daniel Jacob and Andreas Dufter (eds.), Focus and background in Romance languages, 155–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.