Renata Enghels’ investigation has specialised in corpus research from a functional and cognitive perspective. She has a particular interest in verbal argument structures, and focuses on the functional relations between formal-syntactic structures in Romance languages – and especially in Spanish –, the semantic and pragmatic roles of linguistic units and their morphological markings. Her PhD research, which appeared as a book published by Niemeyer (Mouton de Gruyter), investigated on the interaction between mental ‘constructions’ of different perception modalities and the semantic and syntactic behaviour of the corresponding verbs. She has also frequently published on the causative infinitive constructions, on the polysemy of cognate verbs in different Romance languages, and on grammaticalization and subjectification as processes that derive discourse markers from perception/cognitive verbs. She is appointed as a professor of Hispanic and General Romance linguistics and directs PhD theses on topics ranging from the polysemy of perception verbs and put verbs, discourse markers, deverbal nominalizations and terms of address. She is currently involved in a research project on the contact and interfaces between Spanish and English in various dimensions (going from syntactic anglicisms, to the phenomenon of Spanglish).
