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Angela Downing holds B. A. Honours and M. A. degrees in French and Spanish from the University of Oxford and is a graduate in English Philology of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she obtained her PhD. She held the Chair in English Language and Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense from 1986 until 2003 and is now Professor Emeritus. She has taught and conducted seminars on functional grammar, pragmatics and discourse analysis both at the Universidad Complutense and at other universities in Spain and abroad. She has supervised more than twenty doctoral theses and given numerous presentations at congresses, many of them international. With Philip Locke she co-authored A University Course in English Grammar (Prentice-Hall 1992), which in 1993 won the first prize in the Grammar and Dictionaries category of the Duke of Edinburgh´s Award and also the Premio de Investigación Enrique García Díez granted by AEDEAN. A new edition was published by Routledge in 2002, followed by a second revised edition in 2006 under the title English Grammar. A University Course. She has also authored research articles and reviews in national and international journals such as Revista Española de Lingüística, Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, WORD, Functions of Language and Intercultural Pragmatics. She has contributed chapters in edited volumes such as Thematic Development in English Text (1995), Meaning and Form, Studies for Michael Halliday (1996), Functional Descriptions. Theory in Practice (1996), Discourse and Pragmatics in Functional Grammar (1997), Discourse and Community (2000), Presente y futuro de la lingüística en España (2002), Language and Function. To the memory of Jan Firbas (2002), Pragmatic Markers in Contrast (2006). She was Editor-in-chief of the journal Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense from its inauguration in 1992 through 2006, and serves or has served on the Advisory Board of scholarly journals such as Atlantis, Estudios de Filología Moderna, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, Miscelánea and Studies in English Language and Linguistics. She is a member of the Philological Society, London, and of several other academic societies and associations.