María FREDDI is tenured Researcher in English language and linguistics at the University of Pavia, where she currently teaches courses in English grammar, text and corpus linguistics. She has a PhD from the Catholic University, Milan on the rhetoric of science. Her research interests include corpus linguistics also applied to the study of translation, English for Specific and Academic Purposes, in particular the discourse of science and technology, areas in which she has published research articles and contributed to national and international conferences. She is the author of the book Functional Grammar: An introduction for the EFL student, Bologna, 2006