Research Team

Dr Ioanna Sitaridou is University Reader in Spanish and Historical Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics and Modern and Medieval Languages at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Prior to her Cambridge appointment she worked as a postdoctoral researcher, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Jürgen M. Meisel, at the Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg investigating word order in Old Romance, the licensing of subjects in Old French and the loss of null subjects in the history of French due to contact with Germanic (2002-2005). She received her PhD in Romance linguistics at the University of Manchester (2002). Her doctoral dissertation is entitled ‘The synchrony and diachrony of Romance infinitives with nominative subjects’ and was supervised by Prof. Nigel Vincent. She also holds an MA in Linguistics from University College London (1998) and a BA in French Philology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (1997), part of which was spent at the University of Lisbon (1997) studying Portuguese and Romance linguistics. Her main areas of research are synchronic and diachronic syntax of the Romance languages, and also of certain Greek varieties such as Pontic and Cypriot Greek. The issues she investigates are: the relationship between syntactic change and acquisition, language contact, and micro-variation. She has published articles in Diachronica (2), Lingua (2), Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Folia Linguistica, among others.

Dr Stergios Chatzikyriakidis holds a BA in Greek Philology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, an MSc in Computational Linguistics and a PhD in Linguistics from King’s College London. He is currently a research fellow at the University of Gothenburg, working at the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability, and a visiting research fellow at King's College, London. He got a three-year post-doctoral research at Royal Holloway, working on the project 'Lexical Semantics in Type Theory with Coercive subtyping' under the supervision of Professor Zhaohui Luo. After that he was a researcher at the University of Montpellier 2, LIRMM, CNRS, working for the ANR project, Polymnie. His work concentrates on the use of Modern Type Theories in representing Natural Language semantics as well as the implementation of these semantics in interactive proof assistants like Coq or Plastic. He is also a teaching assistant at the Open University of Cyprus. Prior to his post at Royal Holloway, he has worked extensively on the syntax of weak object pronouns in a number of Modern Greek dialects (Southern Italian, Cypriot and Pontic Greek) using the parsing-oriented Dynamic Syntax framework. His interest in various aspects of the Pontic Greek clitic system has developed into an ongoing specific interest in the clitic system of Romeyka, and also to a more general interest concerning the syntax of the dialect as a whole.  His current research with regards Romeyka is an in-depth examination into the person restrictions found in the clitic system of Romeyka, and a comparison of these findings with equivalent data from Pontic Greek.   

Peter Mackridge is Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at King’s College London. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. His groundbreaking research on Pontic Greek spoken in Turkey has led directly to the current scholarly activity on the topic. His books include The Modern Greek Language (1985), Dionysios Solomos (1989) and Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 (2009). He is co-author of Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language (1997) and Greek: An Essential Grammar of the Modern Language (2004). All five of these books have also been published in Greek. He is co-editor, with Eleni Yannakakis, of Ourselves and Others: the Development of a Greek Macedonian Cultural Identity since 1912 (1997) and Contemporary Greek Fiction in a United Europe: From Local History to the Global Individual (2004). A collection of his essays in Greek on Greek poets entitled Εκμαγεία της ποίησης appeared in 2008, and he has published almost 100 academic articles and book chapters in English and Greek. He has edited Greek editions of novels by Kosmas Politis (1982 and 1988) and edited both the Greek text and the English translations of The Free Besieged and Other Poems by Dionysios Solomos (2000).

Dr Dimitris Michelioudakis holds a BA in Greek Philology from the University of Athens and a MPhil and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research, supervised by Prof. Ian Roberts and Dr Ioanna Sitaridou, focused on the syntax of dative arguments, including a micro-comparative study of inherent Case in contemporary and historical varieties of Greek. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project LANGELIN (‘Meeting Darwin’s last challenge: toward a global tree of human languages and genes’, PI: Prof. Giuseppe Longobardi) at the University of York. As part of his micro-comparative research, he has co-authored, with Dr Ioanna Sitaridou, several papers on different aspects of the syntax of Romeyka and Pontic Greek, such as dative substitutes, person restrictions in pronominal constructions, and multiple wh-fronting.

Nicolaos Neocleous holds a BA in Greek Philology from the University of Athens (Greece), a Master’s Degree in Modern and Contemporary History from the Panteion University (Greece) and a Master’s Degree in Linguistics from the University of Athens (Greece). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr Ioanna Sitaridou. His doctoral research aims to develop a diachronic account of the developments affecting headedness in Romeyka.

Dr Stavroula Tsiplakou received her BA in Greek Philology from the University of Athens, a MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Linguistics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Prior to her appointment as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Open University of Cyprus in 2010, she taught at the University of Hull in the U.K. (1995-1998), at Simon Fraser University (1998-2001) and at the Department of Education of the University of Cyprus (2001-2009). Her current research focuses on syntax, language acquisition, pragmatics and language variation, and bi/dialectalism. She has co-authored the new National Curricula for Language Arts in Cyprus and in Greece. In the Romeyka project she works on sociolinguistics and language attitudes.

Adam Gibbins graduated from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge in Linguistics in June 2013. Aside from devoting two years on top of his studies to acquire Modern Greek, Adam focused heavily on the linguistics of the Greek language, including an undergraduate dissertation on the diachrony of negation and modality in Greek, supervised by Dr Ioanna Sitaridou. Adam has played a part in the organisation of several workshops on Greek linguistics at Queens’ College, and continues to work closely with Dr Sitaridou as a Research Assistant.

Laurentia Schreiber holds a BA in German and Dutch Philology from Freie Universität Berlin. She wrote her Master's thesis on the sociolinguistic situation of Romeyka under the co-tutelle supervision of Prof. Dr. Horst Simon and Dr Ioanna Sitaridou.  

After graduating in Spanish and Portuguese from Newnham College, University of Cambridge in June 2012, Helen Whimpanny has been working with Dr Ioanna Sitaridou as a Research Assistant. Her interests include Romance syntax, specifically clitic climbing and the null-subject parameter in Ibero-Romance varieties, which formed the topic of her undergraduate dissertation. Whilst studying as an undergraduate, she assisted in the organisation of the Second Workshop on ‘Romeyka and Asia Minor Greek’ at Queens’ College on 1st April 2012.