Stavros Assimakopoulos

Visiting Researcher

Linguistics and English Language

School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

University of Edinburgh

Dugald Stewart Building

3 Charles Street

Edinburgh, EH8 9AD

E-mail: stavros at ling dot ed dot ac dot uk

I have recently completed my PhD in Linguistics under the supervision of Ronnie Cann and Caroline Heycock. My thesis, entitled 'Logical Structure and Relevance', was examined on the 28^th of February 2008 by Deirdre Wilson and Dan Wedgwood and is available to download here (For the abstract alone click here).

My current full academic CV can be accessed here.

Research interests

My research lies in between theoretical linguistics, cognitive psychology and philosophy. In my work up to this point, I have focused mainly on the implications that Relevance Theory carries for the mentalist study of linguistic semantics and syntax. Even though I like to think of myself as a relevance theorist in principle, in the course of time I have developed a keen interest in the following topic areas (which are certainly connected to cognitive pragmatics in many respects):

- Conceptual content

- Context selection and co-ordination between interlocutors

- Human rationality and mind-reading (with special reference to metarepresentation and joint attention)

- The pragmatics of grammaticality/acceptability judgments

- Dynamic Syntax

- Argument structure

- Language evolution

- Translation theory

Even though my research output has been purely philosophical up to now, I am also particularly interested in conducting experiments in the near future, since I already have the (surprisingly unconventional) habit of basing my theoretical claims on existing experimental evidence.

Selected talks and publications

Assimakopoulos, S. (2009) 'Mindreading and the evolution of linguistic meaning'. Paper presented at the Language Evolution and Computation Research Group. Edinburgh, UK.

Assimakopoulos, S. (2009) 'The role of inference in the mentalist study of linguistic semantics'. Invited talk at the Topics in Logic and Language Seminar Series. Institut Jean Nicod - Paris, France.

Assimakopoulos, S. (2008) 'Intention, common ground and the availability of semantic content: a relevance-theoretic perspective', in Kecskes, I. & Mey, J.L. (eds.) Intention, common ground and the egocentric speaker-hearer. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 105-126.

Assimakopoulos, S. (2008) 'Beyond ostension: the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure as a fast and frugal heuristic'. Invited talk at the Workshop on Naturalism and Bounded Rationality (May 2008). University of Granada, Spain.

Assimakopoulos, S. (2007) 'Radical contextualism: a relevance-theoretic perspective'. Paper delivered at the 10th IPrA conference. Gothenburg, Sweden.

Assimakopoulos, S. (2006) 'Relevance considerations during language production'. Paper delivered at the 3rd Łódz Symposium on Linguistic Pragmatics. Łódz, Poland.

Assimakopoulos, S. (2006) 'Cognitive representation and the relevance of on-line constructions', in Ebert, C. & Endriss, C. (eds.) Proceedings of the Sinn und Bedeutung 10 (Vol. 1). Berlin: ZAS, pp. 1-15.

Extra background information

I was born and raised in the third largest city of Greece, Patra. Serving as an international port, my hometown is particularly famous for its huge carnival celebrations and was selected to be the European cultural capital for 2006. My family, which recently grew with the addition of my beloved niece, still lives there. At the age of 18, right after finishing school, I came to the UK to study the English language and literature at its source. Completing my undergraduate course at the University of Bedfordshire, I relocated to Guildford, where I studied for my MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. Then, having been given the opportunity to pursue doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, I moved to Scotland, where, even after having relocated to my hometown in Greece, I can still be found from time to time obsessing (mainly) about the mental underpinnings of the human linguistic ability.

Relaxation

- Natassa's Edinburgh wallpaper.

- Snow at the University of Surrey campus.

- Scottish uniqueness.

- Nothing more relaxing than this...

Last updated: June 2009