Cristina Sánchez López, Spanish Language Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), has been chosen this new member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), in the plenary that the corporation has held at its headquarters in Madrid. Sánchez López, a philologist, born in Madrid in 1966, will occupy the P chair, vacant since the death of the philologist Francisco Rico, on April 27, 2024. The scope of Sánchez’s research is “the grammar of Spanish, specifically, the syntax, the relations between the lexicon and the syntax, the grammatical variation in the Spanish -speaking world and the historical syntax” In a statement. The chosen participates in several projects aimed at improving the teaching of Spanish grammar in secondary and high school (the latter is co -author of two Spanish language manuals). It has also been the coordinator of the revised edition of the New grammar of the Spanish language, which was presented in Quito (Ecuador), at the XVII Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), in November.
As the RAE Statutes point out, which establish the regulations of entering new members in the institution, each candidacy has to be endorsed by three academics. In the case of Sánchez, it had the support of Ignacio Bosque, Miguel Sáenz and Paloma Díaz-Mas. The other candidate was the economist José Luis García Delgado. The statutes establish that to be elected, at least the absolute majority of votes must be obtained. With her, there are now 12 women in the RAE for 33 men.
Professor since 2008 at the Complutense, Cristina Sánchez graduated in Hispanic Philology (Hispanic linguistic section) and in Romanesque philology from this university, where she was a PhD in Philology in 1993. She was a professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid from 1993 to 2000 and visiting researcher at Harvard universities (United States), La Serena (Chile) and Ca ‘Foscari de Venice (Italy). “He has taught degree, grade, master’s degree and doctorate courses on almost all disciplines in which the study of the Spanish language is usually divided, such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse analysis and comparative grammar of Romanesque languages,” says the RAE.
Among the issues that have been investigated, the most are “the degree of adjectives and adverbs, denial, comparative, constructions with SE, particles and sentence mode.” He has published on these issues numerous articles and has contributed to reference works on Spanish, such as the Descriptive grammar of the Spanish languagedirected by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte, and the Historical Syntax of the Spanish Languagedirected by Concepción Company.
The elected academic directed from its creation until recently the UCM research group on relations between the lexicon and the theoretical syntax / grammar of the Spanish and has been the principal investigator of three research projects financed within the National Plan. In addition, he has collaborated in the Manual of the new Spanish language grammar.
Vice-Dean of Academic Planning and Study Plans of the Faculty of Philology of the UCM (2006-2010) and director of its Spanish Language Department and Literature Theory (2013-2022), since 2014 collaborates with different agencies and institutions, national and international, for the evaluation of the quality of teaching and research.
The RAE has 46 six academic chairs and after the election of Sanchez, only the corresponding one is vacant to the letter or, whose previous head was the architect Antonio Fernández de Alba, who died on May 7, 2024. Sánchez has a period of two improvable years to read his speech with which he will take possession of the chair p.