I was born in Patras in 1971, where I grew up and received my primary and secondary education. In 1990 I moved to Athens to study Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. I graduated in 1994 and in the next year I participated in the examinations of the State Scholarship Foundation of the Hellenic Republic and I was awarded the scholarship for postgraduate studies in Theoretical Linguistics in a university abroad. I chose to study in the University of Reading, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Irene Philippaki-Warburton. I received my MA in Theoretical Linguistics in 1996 and I continued my studies in the Ph.D. program of Theoretical Linguistics the next year. I completed my Ph.D. Thesis on “Agreement Relations in Greek” in 1999 and I successfully passed the viva examination and graduated in 2000.
In September 2001 I was appointed by the Department of Mediterranean Studies of the University of the Aegean, first as a Teaching Staff and then as a Lecturer of Linguistics. In 2009 I was appointed as a Lecturer by the Department of Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, in which I currently serve as an Associate Professor with the specialization of Linguistics: Generative Syntax.
My main research interests lie on syntax and morphology and their interface with phonology. Within the Minimalist Program of the Principles and Parameters Theory and the Distributed Morphology framework, I have worked on issues regarding (a) the morphosyntax of Greek verb and clitics, (b) the Greek clause structure, (c) subject-verb agreement and pro-drop, (c) control, raising and quasi-ECM constructions, (d) case conflict situations in free relatives, (e) the effects of syntactic derivation on prosodification, (f) small clause structure and agreement between the secondary predicate and its “subject”, (g) full vs. partial agreement and gender conflict resolution in coordination, (h) the morphophonology of Greek verbal system and more specifically the exponence of little v, the exponence of past Tense and root allomorphy, (i) the effect of syntactic derivation in determining the stress patterns of verb forms and derivational constructions, (j) Classical Greek infinitives and and their subjects, (k) Classical Greek participles and absolute constructions, (l) Classical Greek prepositions, (m) the decomposition of case into features, and (n) strong island phenomena.
I am also interested in Greek dialectology and more specifically in the documentation and description of Asia Minor Greek dialects and varieties such as Pontic, Cappadocian, Pharasiot, Silliot, etc. I have worked on various issues regarding their morphosyntactic structure, such as Differential Case Marking, nominal inflection, the development of agglutinative patterns and the impact of the long-term language contact with Turkish. I have also investigated Greek-Turkish contact in the Greek and Turkish varieties of the bilingual Muslim community of Rhodes.
Another area I am interested in is the grammatical description of Greek. I translated and adopted in Greek the book Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language by Peter Mackridge, David Holton & Irene Philippaki-Warburton (Routledge, 1997), which I subsequently revised in its second edition (Routledge, 2012). I have also worked on comparative descriptions of Greek with Turkish and Albanian within the relevant actions of three research projects: (a) Program for the Education of Muslim Children – Action: Greek as a foreign language for secondary school (muslim) students: Grammar and teaching (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens); (b) Pythagoras Project – Action: A comparative study of Greek – Turkish: Grammatical analysis and acquisition of Turkish as a foreign language (University of the Aegean); (c) Education of Foreigner and Repatriated Students – Action: Reinforcement of students’ mother tongue (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki).
Finally, I have worked on the diachronic development of certain morphosyntactic phenomena in Greek, such as the development of the mood system and of the clause structure from Ancient to Modern Greek, the development of second and non-second position clitics in Standard Modern Greek and its dialects from the clitic system of Koine Greek, the development of agglutinative patterns and harmony-like processes in the nominal inflection of Central Asia Minor Greek dialects, and the development of the morphology and syntax of participles from Ancient to Modern Greek through the stage of Medieval Greek.