Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura

José Pinto de Lima was born in Lisbon on 4 / 10 / 1949. In 1974 he graduated in Germanic Philology at the Universidade de Lisboa, where he started as a lecturer in 1977, and from where he obtained his PhD in 1990.

He was Assistant Professor of the Universidade de Lisboa from 1990 to 2003 and Associate Professor of the same University since 2003 until the present.

He has held teaching assignments in the areas of General Linguistics and German Linguistics (and, more recently, also in the areas of Linguistics Applied to Translation and Communication Studies).

Focal points of his research have been Dependency Grammar, Pragmatics, Semantics and Language Change. Lately he has worked mainly on Grammaticalization and Lexicalization. His perspective is often that of a Contrastive Linguistics German-Portuguese.

Along his career he has carried out several research stays in Germany (mainly with Professor Rudi Keller, University of Düsseldorf), supported by grants of the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), and a research stay in the USA (with Professor Elizabeth Traugott, Stanford University, 1997), supported by the FLAD, Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. He has held conferences in Portugal (Lisbon, Braga and Coimbra) and abroad in Russia (Moscow), Bulgaria (Plovdiv and Sofia), Germany (Hanover) and Italy (Bologna).

From 2003 to 2007 he was a researcher of the CEAE, Centro de Estudos Alemães e Europeus (supported by FCT, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), and the Coordinator of the Subproject QUEST-SIGN, as part of the activities of the Centre. In 2007 he joined the CECC, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Cultura (also a Centre of the FCT).

He is the Local Organizer of the 42nd International Conference of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, which will take place at the University of Lisbon in September 2009.