Profesorado

Mercedes Díez Prados

Mercedes Díez Prados is Associate Professor at Alcalá University (Madrid), Spain. She obtained two undergraduate degrees, in Spanish and English Philology, and a PhD in English Philology at the Complutense University of Madrid; she also graduated from a Master of Arts in the Teaching of English as a Second Language at the University of Illinois (U.S.A.). Her research fields and publications deal with diverse areas of linguistics, particularly at the discursive and pragmatic levels: TEFL (specifically, writing in English as a foreign language), anglicisms, language and gender, evidentiality, evaluation, and persuasion. In the mid-nineties (1996), she co-authored some textbooks for teaching English in Secondary Education in Spain (Edelvives). Her main study on the use of cohesive and coherence devices in texts written by Spanish university students was published in 2003 in the book entitled Coherencia y Cohesión en Textos Escritos en Inglés por Alumnos de Filología Inglesa (Estudio Empírico). Her latest most relevant publications are the articles “Construction and negotiation of voter-friendly identities in electoral debates” (2020, Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación), “Evaluation of status as a persuasive tool in Spanish and American pre-electoral debates before populism” (2018, Atlantis), “Positive self-evaluation versus negative other-evaluation in the political genre of pre-election debates” (2014, Discourse and Society), all co-authored with Ana B. Cabrejas Peñuelas; “Abstract nouns as metadiscursive shells in academic discourse” (2018, Caplletra); and the book chapters “Paralinguistic Resources in Persuasive Business Communication in English and Spanish” (2021, co-authored with Ana M. Cestero); “Verbal and non-verbal engagement devices in business persuasive discourse: the elevator pitch” (2019) and “The use of metaphor and evaluation as discourse strategies in pre-electoral debates: Just about winning votes.” (2016), all three published by John Benjamins.