Short Bio

 My name is Thanasis Georgakopoulos (θaˈnasis ʝeorɣaˈkopulos) and I am Assistant Professor in Historical Linguistics at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. 

I hold a BA in Greek Philology, an MA in Theoretical Linguistics and a PhD in Linguistics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. My doctoral dissertation  was a diachronic study of the semantics of ancient Greek prepositions (mainly of the allative eis), in which I relied on the analytical tools of cognitive linguistics and adopted a typological perspective.

In the years after my Ph.D., I was involved in several funded research projects, which can be thematically divided into two main axes. The first axis pertains to the examination of the cross-linguistic differences in the linguistic construal of motion (see, e.g., my project on "Source-Goal asymmetry in Ancient Greek" at FU, Berlin). The second axis lies in the intersection between linguistic typology and historical linguistics. In my research, I aim to show that the use of tools well established in linguistic typology, such as semantic maps, when combined with proven methods of historical semantics, enables a principled approach to long-standing questions in the field of diachronic lexical semantics (see, e.g., my project “Lexical Diachronic Semantic Maps: representing and explaining meaning extension” (abbr. "Le Diasema"), in which I collaborated with Dr. Stéphane Polis (University of Liège)).

In the past, I held various academic positions at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), the Free University of Berlin (Excellence Cluster 264 Topoi), the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Münster, the University of Kassel (Germany), the University of Liège in Belgium (Marie Curie BeIPD Cofund Postdoctoral Fellowship), and the National Research University (Higher School of Economics) in Moscow, Russia. As of 2012, I have taught various courses on historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics,  lexical semantics, pragmatics, empirical methods in linguistics, and the trilingual text of the Rosetta Stone (Teaching Award).

I am the Review Editor of the Journal of Historical Linguistics and serve as an ad-hoc reviewer for a number of academic journals such as Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, English Today, Folia Linguistica, Folia Linguistica Historica, Journal of Pragmatics, Linguistics, and Studies in Language.

Research interests 
historical linguistics; historical semantics; linguistic typology; lexical typology; semantic maps; visualization techniques; linguistics of space; cognitive linguistics; construction grammar; empirical methods.

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(from Georgakopoulos & Polis, 2021)

(from Georgakopoulos et al., 2016)

(from Georgakopoulos et al, 2021)