Stavros Assimakopoulos

📌 Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, Room 115 - Block A Portacabins, University of Malta, Msida, MSD 2080, Malta

📞 (+356) 23402674

📩 stavros DOT assimakopoulos AT um DOT edu DOT mt

Whereabouts

Having completed a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and a postdoctoral appointment in Philosophy of Language and Logic at the University of Granada, I am now a resident academic member of the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta. Here, I teach a number of courses in Linguistics and Language Technology. For a (not always up-to-date, but representative enough) list of them, click here, and for a splendidly accurate depiction of what lecturing is unfortunately more often than not really about, here.

Research interests

On the basis of a snap judgement, I could easily be categorised as a linguist, with a specialisation in semantics and pragmatics and more specifically Relevance Theory. Much like my personal outlook, however, I see my research as interdisciplinary and seek through it to connect ideas coming from the domains of formal linguistics, philosophy and cognitive psychology with a view to (eventually) developing a psychologically realistic account of linguistic meaning and meaning-making practices, while taking into account their sociological dimensions. On top of this long-lasting obsession, I have developed a vivid interest in critical discourse studies (especially in relation to the study of hate speech and discriminatory discourse in general), a field that I am presently working on by conducting data-driven research on discourses of traditional and social media and combining it with theoretical perspectives stemming from philosophy of language and argumentation theory. Additionally, I am quite keen on thinking about the nature of context and context selection processes, the evolution of language, literary and translation theory, and the ways in which speaker intentions can be shown to creep in grammatical formalisms, as in the case of Dynamic Syntax. Finally, even though I was originally trained as a theoretical linguist, I am an ardent supporter of the recent shift of focus towards digital methods and tools for the study of language and ideology within the scope of the exciting global turn towards digital humanities. In this vein, I actively advocate the strengthening of digital and computational literacy of Higher Education students with a more humanistic orientation.

Professional service

Parallel to my academic engagement at UM's ILLT, I am currently serving as co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics and co-Editor of the CADAAD Journal.

I am also a member of the editorial board for Ampersand, Corpus Pragmatics and the Routledge Focus on (Im)politeness book series