About me

Welcome! 

Since the completion of my PhD in 2018, I have worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics and more specifically I am involved in research on morphosyntax, multilingualism and aphasia and have taught courses on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. A full list of course I have taught can be found on my website. I also coordinate ongoing activities at  the Cyprus Acquisition Team lab (Director: Kleanthes K. Grohmann, more here: https://research.biolinguistics.eu/CAT/) , such as regular meetings, talks and ongoing research activities. If you are interested in giving a talk at the lab, contact me at nataliapavlou@gmail.com.

I have completed my Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago (click here for dissertation). I am interested in syntax and morphology and their interface and a major goal of my research is to understand the structure of sentences and words. My  main empirical focus is on the syntax and morphology of Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek.

Beyond my current focus on theoretical linguistics, I have worked on experimental projects investigating adult speech and children’s speech development in diglossic contexts. This work investigates the patterns of exposure in both a standard language and a dialect and its consequences with respect to the development of grammar and the sociolinguistic aspects of it.

I have also conducted fieldwork on the endangered minority language of Cypriot Maronite Arabic (Sanna), which was firstly funded by the Rella I. Cohn fund for the purpose of investigating code-mixing and allomorphy in nouns and its implications for morphosyntactic theory. As postdoctoral research, work with the Maronite community was funded by the University of Cyprus for the purpose of studying morphosyntactic variation between different  generations and defining the grammatical properties characterizing 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.

Other recent side interests I have are data analytics and the application of programming in research  to better handle the data deluge with respect to specific classes of problems. With the completion of postgraduate studies in data analytics, I have worked on POS tagging methods to create a corpus of Cypriot Greek with a tagset so as to incorporate intricacies in natural language understanding in order to explore and teach a machine.

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