Javier Pérez-Guerra obtained his PhD in English Linguistics in 1990 with a dissertation on thematic variation in English. In 2001, he was appointed Senior Lecturer, and in 2017 he became Professor at the University of Vigo, where he coordinates the research group ‘Language Variation and Textual Categorisation’. This group has consistently secured funding from the Spanish Research Agency and the Government of Galicia.
Javier has supervised the PhD dissertations of Victorina González-Díaz, Rosalía Rodríguez-Vázquez, David Tizón-Couto, Beatriz Tizón-Couto, Evelyn Gandón-Chapela, Yolanda Fernández-Pena, Carla Bouzada-Jabois, Sofía Bemposta-Rivas and Elizaveta Smirnova, and he is currently supervising additional doctoral students at the University of Vigo.
Professor Pérez-Guerra has organized numerous national and international conferences, including the recent International Workshop on Modelling the Linguistic Architecture of English: Cognitive and Empirical Developments (2023), the 32nd European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference (ESFLC2023, 2023), 45th ICAME (2024), the 6th Conference on Variation and Language Processing (VALP6, 2024) and the 2nd Gibraltar International Conference (GIC2, 2024).
He is also actively engaged in academic journal editing, serving as Managing and Review Editor of Folia Linguistica, Co-editor of SEDERI (Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies), Co-editor of Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL) and Editor of e-AESLA.
Over the years, he has held visiting positions at various prestigious institutions, including the Universities of Manchester, London, Edinburgh, Oxford, Helsinki, MIT, Princeton, Cornell, California at Santa Barbara, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Cambridge, Kent, Wisconsin-Madison, Lancaster and Henan University. He was appointed Adjunct Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Henan University (China), and an Honorary Member of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton.
His primary research interests include word order and information packaging in the clause, the multidimensional model of register analysis, grammatical variation in recent diachrony, and the influence of performance preferences and processing ease on the development of grammatical structures.