Tamara Bouso Rivas

Tamara Bouso Rivas is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Santiago de Compostela, affiliated with the Department of English and German Philology within the Faculty of Philology. Her research focuses on historical and cognitive linguistics, particularly the diachronic development of syntactic constructions such as Reaction Object Constructions (ROC) and Superlative Objoid Constructions. She holds a Doctorate (2018) from the University of Santiago de Compostela, where her thesis examined the evolution of ROCs in English.

Her work integrates corpus linguistics and construction grammar to explore how language changes over time, with a special emphasis on 19th-century sentimental novels and their influence on grammatical patterns. Key contributions include the creation of the British Sentimental Novel Corpus (BSNC) to study individual linguistic behavior in aggregate. Recent projects investigate links between Objoid constructions using structural priming experiments.

Bouso has published extensively on constructional networks, transitivity shifts, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying grammaticalization. Her interdisciplinary work spans syntax, semantics, and discourse analysis, often addressing how non-standard object structures (e.g., reaction objects, superlatives) convey meaning through form-meaning pairings.

• PhD: University of Santiago de Compostela (2018)
• Primary Research Themes: Diachronic syntax, constructionalization, corpus-driven linguistics
• Key Methodologies: Corpus analysis, structural priming experiments, qualitative discourse analysis