Marta Reis Almeida got her B.A. in English and Portuguese from the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She then worked for ten years in the American School of Rio as coordinator of the Learning Center, planning individual programs for the specific needs of the students. She also taught Social Studies. In 1992, she enrolled in the graduate program in the Linguistics Department of the University of Florida. Her Masters’ Thesis analyzed the political discourse of two distinguished female Brazilian politicians of grassroots movements- Benedita da Silva and Luisa Erundina. Since then, she has continued her research and presented the results in conferences and workshops about Brazilian women in politics. In 1998 she finished her Ph.D. Her dissertation was about Compound Words in Portuguese, English and Spanish from a syntactic perspective. Currently, Marta teaches Linguistics, Portuguese and Spanish at the University of Georgia. She has presented numerous papers in conferences in Brazil and the USA in the areas of Sociolinguistics and Portuguese Linguistics.