About me

Welcome! 

I am a Lecturer in Linguistics at the United Arab Emirates University. My primary research interests lie in syntax and morphology, and particularly in their interface. My work aims to understand the structural organization of words and sentences, with an empirical focus on Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek. Beyond my work in theoretical linguistics, I have engaged in experimental research on both adult and child speech in diglossic contexts, examining how exposure to both a standard language and a dialect shapes grammatical development and sociolinguistic competence.

I received my Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 2018. After that, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Instructor in Linguistics at the University of Cyprus, conducting research on morphosyntax, multilingualism, and aphasia, and teaching courses in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. A full list of course I have taught can be found on this website. As part of my postdoctoral research, I have conducted fieldwork on Cypriot Maronite Arabic (Sanna), an endangered minority language of Cyprus. This research was initially supported by the Rella I. Cohn Fund and focused on code-mixing and allomorphy in nouns, and their implications for morphosyntactic theory. Subsequently, with funding from the University of Cyprus, I investigated morphosyntactic variation across generations within the Maronite community, contributing to our understanding of Sanna as a heritage language. More info about the project will be posted here: https://cyprusheritagelanguages.com/. I have also been awarded a METADIDAKTOR postdoctoral research grant by the Cyprus University of Technology to conduct research in aphasia and typically developing adults in Cyprus with respect to their morphosyntax, and more specifically aspect.

Following postgraduate studies in data analytics, I have also worked on part-of-speech tagging for Cypriot Greek, developing a corpus designed to capture language-specific features and support research in natural language processing and machine learning.

You can also see my cv for more details on my research interests or contact me at nataliapavlou@gmail.com or natalia.pavlou@uaeu.ac.ae

My ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9363-531X