Principal

Biodata Johan Pedersen

Johan Pedersen works in cognitive linguistics and has specialized in construction grammar. He began his university career in 1997 and has been associate professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, since 2005.
He has been involved in a number of research projects as the main researcher or as a research participant:

  • The Construction of Macro-events: Grammar and Lexicon – a typological perspective
    (Current project). Abstract (link)
  • The global and the local perspective – convergence and variation in language and culture (Current project, co-directed with Ken Faro, University of Copenhagen)
  • Participant in MULINCO (Multilingual Corpus of the University of Copenhagen)
    Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies and Centre for Language Technology. Responsible of the Spanish part of the project. Other languages involved: Danish, English, German, Dutch, French, Italian and Portuguese.
  • The Morphological Construction – A Construction Grammar Approach to Spanish Mood (Current project)
  • Grammar and Cognition - a textbook project (current project)
  • Construction grammar and Second Language Acquisition (to be continued, depending on funding, co-directed with Teresa Cadierno, University of Southern Denmark).
  • Subject-object identification - the Spanish impersonal se-construction
  • The Spanish reflexive-intensifier construction
  • The Construction of Coherence in Spanish



He is member of the executive committee of the research group Danish Functional Grammar directed by Professor Peter Harder. He is a member of the corpus project MULINCO (Multilingual Corpus of the University of Copenhagen), a collaboration between Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies and Centre for Language Technology, in which he is responsible of the Spanish part of the project. He is participating in the Scandinavian network: Variation and Change in Language, and the Danish Grammar Network: Ny Forskning i Grammatik. He has been invited to present his research in a number of occasions:

  • Guest lecture at Stockholm University, 2006: Perspectivas de la gramática construccional.
  • Invited speaker for the celebration of the 75. anniversary of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. 2006: Sprog, evolution og kognition - et dilemma der peger fremad.

Moreover, he has presented his research at many international conferences:

  • International seminar on grammaticalization. University of Copenhagen, 1997. Title: Clause Combining: grammatical-lexical meaning structure.
  • XXVII Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística (SEL), Palma de Mallorca, Spain. 1997. Title: Orientación conceptual en la oración compuesta.
  • Ph.D.-conference, University of Lund, Sweden, 1998. Title: Reconsidering the interclausal relationship.
  • XXVIII Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística (SEL), Madrid, 1998. Title: Los constituyentes de la gramática cognitiva.
  • The third annual meeting of the High Desert Linguistics Society. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico: High Desert Linguistics Society, 2000. Title: Reconsidering the interclausal relationship and its grammaticization. A case study of Spanish aunque. A new cognitive approach to adverbial subordination.
  • II Congreso de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Cognitiva (AELCO), Madrid, 2000. Title: Alternancias conectivas y control discursivo.
  • The Ninth International Conference on Functional Grammar, Madrid, 2000. Title: Reconsidering the interclausal relationship and its grammaticalization.
  • II Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística, Madrid, 2000. Title: El subordinante adverbial y el proceso de gramaticalización. El caso de ‘aunque’.
  • Seventh International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC), Santa Barbara, California, 2001. Title: To link constructions and to construct the link.
  • The Second International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG), Helsingfors, September 2002. Title: Case-marking in the Spanish impersonal se-construction. Constructional aspects of the historical change.
  • The Sixth Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Conference, Rice University, Houston, 2002. Title: The Spanish impersonal se-construction. Voice and case.
  • Grammaticalization Network, international seminar with Henning Andersen, Ulrich Detges, Brian Joseph, Daniel Jacob. Title: Reflexive intensification in Spanish. A historical perspective, 2003.
  • The Eighth International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics (ICLC) 2003, La Rioja, Spain, Title: The reflexive intensifier in Spanish.
  • The XVIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 2003, Copenhagen. Title: Reflexive intensification in Spanish. Toward a complex reflexive?
  • Conference organized by the Language and Culture Network: Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity, University of Århus, 2003. Title: Construction Grammar and Second Language Acquisition: A Cognitive Understanding of Language in a Contrastive Perspective. Presentation with Teresa Cadierno (SDU).
  • International Seminar on Language Change and Explanatory Models, University of Copenhagen, 2004. Title: Grammar-based or Usage-based Connectives: on Changes in the Mood-selection in Spanish.
  • XXXIV Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística, Madrid, 2004. Title: Intensificación Reflexiva en Español, ¿Hacia Anáforas Reflexivas Complejas?
  • The XVIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.A. 2005. Title: The Spanish impersonal se-construction.
  • XVI Congreso de Romanistas Escandinavos, Copenhague 2005. Title: Intensificación reflexiva en español.
  • The 10th International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics (ICLC) 2007, Krakov, Poland.
    Title: Informational macro-events – a typological perspective.
  • Romanist Conference, Stockholm, Sweden 2007. Title: La construcción de eventos complejos en español: una perspectiva contrastiva.
  • The first Conference of the Swedish Association for Language and Cognition (SALC), Lund, Sweden. Title: The construction of macro-events: typology and information structure.

He is member of the editing board of Revue Romane (responsible for Spanish Linguistics) and was member of the board of referees for Revue Romane from 2001 to 2004. He has co-directed a doctoral dissertation and has been member of Ph.D.-thesis evaluation committees in a number of occasions:

  • Fernando Wachtmeister Bermúdez: la codificación del punto de vista (Ph.D. thesis, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin-American Studies, University of Stockholm). 2006. External opponent of the committee.
  • Kim Ebensgaard Jensen: A construction-based Study of English Predicators. Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark. External opponent of the committee.
  • Henrik Hovmark: Danish directional adverbials and spatial orientation. Ph.D. thesis, University of Copenhagen, Department of Linguistics. President of the committee.

Membership of other scientific committees:

  • External assessor in scientific committee, associate professor appointment at the University of Karlstad, Sweden. 2006.
  • External assessor in scientific committee, associate professor appointment at the University of Karlstad, Sweden. 2007.
  • President of scientific committee, lecturer appointment at the University of Copenhagen, Department of English, Germanic and Romance studies. 2007.

Some recent organizational duties:

  • Since 2007, Coordinator of Spanish and Latinamerican studies at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance studies.
  • Co-organizer of the research seminar Ny Forskning i Grammatik (2005), Middelfart.
  • Co-organizer of the conference Culture in Language Learning, University of Copenhagen. 2004.
  • Co-organizer of an international colloquium on Cognitive Linguistics, Århus. 2003.
  • Member of the Executive Committee of the Language-Culture network. 2002-2003.
  • Co-organizer of the research seminar Ny Forskning i Grammatik (1999), Hillerød.




Curriculum Vitae


List of publications


Contact Information:
Johan Pedersen
Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies
Njalsgade 128
Copenhagen 2300 S
Denmark
Tel. +45 35 32 84 28
E-mail: jhp@hum.ku.dk