I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I have research interests in sociolinguistics (especially language contact, identity and power issues), pragmatics (post-Gricean and cross-cultural), cognitive linguistics (usage-based grammars, metaphor theories) and language change.A particular concern is how (linguistic, micro- and macro-) context is reflected in the production and comprehension of language, and how this may be modelled both synchronically and diachronically. I mostly draw data for my analyses from Cypriot Greek.
I also have secondary research interests in language and emotions, and bilingual lexicography.
I hold an MPhil and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, UK, and a BA in Greek Philology (major: Linguistics) from the University of Athens, Greece. My PhD thesis is available to download here, and the abstract can be viewed here.
Before coming to UIUC, I taught at the Universities of Cambridge (1999-2000, 2005), Cyprus (2003), and Athens (2003-2004). From 2002 till 2005, I held the A.G. Leventis Fellowship, a three-year post-doctoral research fellowship at the British School at Athens. I have also worked as a Research Asssociate on a series of projects in computational pragmatics at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. For these and other projects I am currently involved in, see Grants.