Academic Bio
Dr. Anastasia Giannakidou's broad interests lie in the area of meaning (semantics), and its relation to linguistic form (morphology and syntax). She is also interested in how sentences are used in context (pragmatics) to produce, and enrich, meaning, as well as questions about the foundations of semantics and philosophy of language (mainly questions regarding truth, belief, and context sensitivity).
Dr. Giannakidou has worked on various topics in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and always within a comparative crosslinguistic perspective, which often includes a lot of typological and variation considerations. Her crosslinguistic orientation is partly due to the fact that she is interested in describing the grammar of Greek, her mother tongue, and partly to the fact that she firmly believes that crosslinguistic comparisons are fundamental to our understanding of how grammar works.
Besides Greek, she has also worked on Romance (Spanish and Catalan mainly), Germanic languages (German and Dutch), and recently, in joint work, Chinese and Basque. Recently, her interests have also been expanded in two areas: the internal structure (syntax and semantics) of the quantificational noun phrase (which is the source of inspiration for her book, co-edited with Monika Rathert, to appear with Oxford), and psycholinguistics (studying of home sign systems in collaboration with Susan Goldin Meadow and Carolyn Mylander from Psychology. She is also interested in bilingualism.