Short Bio

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​My name is Thanasis Georgakopoulos (θaˈnasis ʝeorɣaˈkopulos), and I am an 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 explored the diachronic semantics of Ancient Greek prepositions, with particular emphasis on the allative eis. In this work, I adopted a cognitive linguistics perspective and incorporated typological insights.
​Since completing my PhD, I have participated in several funded research projects, which broadly fall into two thematic areas. The first concerns cross-linguistic differences in the linguistic construal of motion, including my project on Source-Goal asymmetry in Ancient Greek (at FU Berlin). The second lies at the intersection of linguistic typology and historical linguistics. My research shows how tools from linguistic typology, such as semantic maps, combined with established methods of historical semantics, can address long-standing questions in diachronic lexical semantics. This line of work includes my project “Lexical Diachronic Semantic Maps: representing and explaining meaning extension” (Le Diasema), carried out in collaboration with Dr. Stéphane Polis (University of Liège).

I have received funding from major national and international research bodies (e.g., Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, DAAD, and the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY)). Since 2025, I have been the Principal Investigator  of the four-year project "From Networks to Semantic Change: A Multifactorial Approach to the Predictability of Meaning Evolution (Acronym: PredictME)", funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.). In 2025, I was awarded the Young Researcher Excellence Award in the Humanities by the Committee on Excellence of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. 

Over the years, I have held academic positions at several institutions, including the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), the Free University of Berlin (Excellence Cluster 264 Topoi), Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Münster, the University of Kassel (Germany), the University of Liège in Belgium (as a Marie Curie BeIPD Cofund Postdoctoral Fellow), and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. Since 2012, I have taught a wide range of courses, including historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics,  lexical semantics, pragmatics, empirical methods in linguistics, and the trilingual text of the Rosetta Stone, for which I received a Teaching Award.

​I currently serve as Review Editor of the Journal of Historical Linguistics and act as an ad-hoc reviewer for several academic journals such as Cognitive Science, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, English Today, Folia Linguistica, Folia Linguistica Historica, Journal of Pragmatics, Scientific Data, Studies in Language, and The Linguistic Review.

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)
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(from Georgakopoulos et al., 2016)
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(from Georgakopoulos et al, 2021)