He is a Full Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Portuguese Catholic University (Braga Regional Centre). His research focuses on lexical semantics, grammar and conceptualisation, linguistic variation and change from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, adopting an empirical, usage-based approach. He also develops studies on metaphor, ideology and media discourses. He is the author of over a hundred articles and several books on cognitive semantics, polysemy, grammar of constructions, causality, linguistic pluricentrism and national varieties of Portuguese, semantic change and the relationship between language, cognition and society.
His book ‘O Mundo dos Sentidos em Português: Polissemia, Semântica e Cognição’ (Almedina, 2006) won the International Linguistics Prize of the Portuguese Language Society. More recently, she edited the books ‘Pluricentricity: Language Variation and Sociocognitive Dimensions’ (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014) and ‘Figurative Language: Intersubjectivity and Usage’ (Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2021). She coordinates two research projects comparing European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese: CONDIV - lexical and grammatical convergence and divergence (funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology) and cultural conceptualisation of emotions (funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation).
He is a member of the scientific committee of several national and international journals, as well as the Societas Linguistica Europaea and the International Association of Cognitive Linguistics. He is director of the Centre for Philosophical and Humanistic Studies and coordinator of the BA in Communication Sciences, the MA in Portuguese as a Foreign/Second Language and the PhD in Linguistics.