📌 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
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📌 School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University, 541 24, Thessaloniki, Greece
📩 assimakopoulos AT enl DOT auth DOT gr
Having completed my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and concluded a postdoctoral appointment in Philosophy of Language and Logic at the University of Granada, I joined the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta as a resident academic in 2011, where I also obtained an associate professorship ten years later. At the very end of 2025, I additionally swore in as Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
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 that takes into account their sociological dimensions too. On top of this long-lasting obsession, I have developed expertise 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 intensively 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 pragmatics 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.
Parallel to my academic engagement at UM and AUTh, 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
