The Team

Elena Anagnostopoulou obtained her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Salzburg in 1994. After a post-doc at MIT (1997-1998), where she returned in 2007 as a Visiting Associate Professor, she took a position at the University of Crete in 1998, where she is currently Professor of Theoretical Linguistics. Her research interests lie in theoretical and comparative syntax, formal linguistic typology, morphology and historical linguistics, with special focus on the interfaces between syntax, morphology, and the lexicon, argument alternations, Case, Agreement, clitics, control and anaphora. In 2013 she received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, in recognition of her past accomplishments in research and teaching.

She is the author of The Syntax of Ditransitives. Evidence from Clitics (Mouton de Gruyter 2003), co-author of External Arguments in Transitivity Alternations: A Layering Approach (Oxford University Press 2015), and has edited 3 collective volumes and has published in journals, edited volumes and conference proceedings. She is Co-I of the project “Investigating Variation and Change: Case in Diachrony”.

Dr Morgan Macleod holds a BA in Anthropology (2005) and a Diploma in Linguistics (2007) from the University of British Columbia; he completed his MPhil (2008) and PhD (2012) in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. His PhD thesis, ‘The Perfect in Old English and Old Saxon’, made use of quantitative corpus-based methodology to investigate the semantic overlap in early Germanic languages between the past tense and the new periphrastic perfect, and to identify variables influencing speakers’ choice among the competing forms. Dr Macleod has been employed in the financial sector, at RBS, where he developed small-scale, customised software solutions and web sites to support and automate frequently performed tasks. Among his recent research is a collaborative project with Dr Howard Jones (Oxford), in which corpus data were used to test diagnostic criteria for the grammaticalization of the Old English passive; the results of this work have recently appeared in Transactions of the Philological Society.

Dr Dionysios Mertyris completed a BA in Greek Philology (2006; Major in Linguistics) and a MA in Linguistics (2008) at the University of Athens. His PhD thesis (2014; La Trobe University) examines the loss of the genitive case in Greek from a diachronic and dialectological perspective. More specifically, his dissertation covers the morpho-syntactic and functional domains in which the genitive was lost from the Classical period (5th-4th c. BC) until today, while it also covers the entire diatopy of the Greek-speaking world (as it used to be in the beginning of the 20th c.) regarding instances of genitive loss dialectally. For the research project Investigating variation and change: Case in diachrony, Dr Mertyris collects data from online databases, such as the Thesaurus Linguae Grecae and the Papyrological Navigator, and is also going conduct fieldwork in dialectal Greek.

Dr Christina Sevdali is a Senior Lecturer in linguistics at Ulster University specializing in diachronic generative syntax and multilingualism. She is the Course Director of the BSc. (Hons) in Language and Linguistics at the School of Communication and Media.

Christina was born in Greece and obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Greek Philology with a Major in Linguistics from the University of Crete in 2000. In 2002, she obtained her MPhil in theoretical linguistics from the University of Cambridge and then moved on to do a PhD, which she obtained in 2007.

Her PhD dissertation ‘Infinitival clauses in Ancient Greek: overt and null subjects, the role of Case and Focus’ from the University of Cambridge, supervised by Ian Roberts, investigates the challenging interaction between the Accusativus cum Infinitivo construction and control in Ancient Greek. During her PhD, Christina also spent a semester at MIT as a visiting student, working with Sabine Iatridou.

Christina’s research interests include synchronic and diachronic syntax, Greek linguistics, syntax – morphology interface and multilingualism. More specifically she is interested in finiteness and its relationship to subjects, the theory of Control and specifically Partial Control, Case/case in synchrony and diachrony especially in relation to phenomena such as focus and emphasis, datives and quirky subjects, object drop and cognate objects and the diachrony of complementation.

In 2017, she secured an Early Career AHRC grant alongside Professor Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete) on “Investigating Variation and Change: Case in Diachrony.” The project looks into on the diachrony of the Greek case system, with particular focus on dative and genitive and, couched within the generative framework, it aims to contribute to the question of the place of case in grammar, as a phenomenon that relates to both syntax and morphology.

Christina has published in leading journals of the field such as Language, Syntax, Lingua, Journal of Historical Syntax, Lingue e Linguaggi, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics and the Proceedings of NELS. She also co-edited an Oxford University Press volume Syntax and Its Limits, with Raffella Folli (University of Ulster) and Robert Truswell (University of Edinburgh). Christina is in the advisory board of the Journal of Historical Syntax.

Christina has supervised a number of dissertations on a variety of linguistic topics and her past students include, Dr Megan Devlin, Dr Frances Kane, and Dr Lynda Kennedy.

She is a member of UCoM (Ulster Centre on Multilingualism) and leads the Language Made Fun project, in collaboration with Barnardo’s NI. This project aims to assist children of refugees and asylum seekers with their English while also promoting multilingualism. Language Made Fun (alongside its sister programme Language Together) is funded by the Family Learning and Integration hub through the Big Lottery Fund.