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Dora Alexopoulou
Fellow

Dr Dora Alexopoulou

Official Fellow; Director of Studies; Fellow in Linguistics

Contact
ta259@cam.ac.uk⁠
Website
Departmental Website⁠

Murray Edwards understands the challenging complexities women face in today's world, an understanding underpinning its original and effective approach to women's education. The modern architecture and beautiful art underscore the College's innovative spirit and provide an inspiring setting for learning

Degrees

  • BA, Greek Philology (Athens)
  • MSc, Natural Language and Speech Processing (Edinburgh)
  • PhD, Linguistics (Edinburgh)

Awards

  • Marie Curie Fellow
  • Alan Turing Fellow, from 2022

Research Interests

Language Acquisition, Language Typology, Theoretical and Experimental Syntax, Corpora.

Biography

After a BA in Greek Philology at the University of Athens, I went to Edinburgh to obtain an MSc in Natural Language and Speech Processing and then a PhD in Linguistics. Before coming to Cambridge I worked at the Universities of Edinburgh and York and held an Intra-European Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Lille III. I am one of the people who set up the Cambridge Bilingualism Network, a public engagement initiative promoting the linguistic and cognitive advantages of bilingualism and I am the founding Editor of Languages, Society and Policy. I joined Murray Edwards in 2016.  Since1 September 2022, I am Assistant Professor in First and Second Language Acquisition and Language Typology.

Authored work

  • 2001, Phonology competes with Syntax: experimental evidence for the interaction of word order and accent placement in the realisation of Information Structure, Cognition, 79.301-372 (with Frank Keller).

     

    2002, On Linkhood, Topicalisation and Clitic Left Dislocation, Journal of Linguistics, vol. 38.2.193-245 (with Dimitra Kolliakou).

     

    2006, Resumption in Relative Clauses, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol.24.1,pp.57-111.

     

    2007, Locality, Cyclicity and Resumption: at the interface between grammar and the human parser, Language, 83.1.110-160 (with Frank Keller).

     

    2008, Binding Illusions, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume on Greek Syntax and Semantics, with commentary by Uli Sauerland.

     

    2010, Truly intrusive: resumptive pronominals in questions and relative clauses, in K.Grohmann and I.M.Tsimpli (eds.), Exploring the Left periphery, Special issue, Lingua,120.3.485-505.

     

    2012, Focus in Greek Wh-questions, in Kucerova, Ivona, and Ad Neeleman (eds), Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure, CUP,  pp. 206-246 (with Mary Baltazani)

     

    2013, Bare Number, in Folli, Sevdali and Truswell (eds), Syntax and its Limits, OUP,pp.300-323 (with R.Folli and G.Tsoulas)

     

    2015, L1 influence on the acquisition order of English Grammatical Morphemes: A learner corpus study, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, with A. Murakami (principal author), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0272263115000352.

     

    2015 Longitudinal L2 development of the English article in individual learners. In Proc. of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Philadelphia, PA: Cognitive Science Society, with A. Murakami (principal author).

     

    2015, Exploring big educational learner corpora for SLA research: perspectives on relative clauses, launch issue of the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research,1(1), 96-129. doi: 10.1075/ijlcr.1.1.04ale with J Geertzen, A Korhonen and D Meurers.

     

    2017, Task Effects on Linguistic Complexity and Accuracy: A Large-Scale Learner Corpus Analysis Employing Natural Language Processing Techniques, Language Learning, 67: 180–208, with M.Michel, A.Murakami and D.Meurers.

     

    2016, L1 influence on the acquisition order of English Grammatical Morphemes: A learner corpus study, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(3), 365-401. with A. Murakami (principal author).
    Winning paper for the 2016 Albert Valdman award.

     

    2020, 'Grammatical Errors: What Can We Do About Them?', Languages, Society and Policy. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.6025 

     

    2020, Big Data and Second Language Acquisition: advances in methodology and analysis, in Marrta Gonzalez-Lloret and Nicole Ziegler (eds), Handbook of SLA and Technology, Routledge, with A Murakami A.and D Meurers

     

    2021 The impact of L2 proficiency on cross-language influence during L2 word processing. Cambridge Open Engage, with F Branzi, Y Chang and C Gaele doi:10.33774/coe-2021-fv5gt-v2

     

    2021 How our linguistic mind guides language learning TEDxCambridgeUniversity, March 2021.

     

Subject
Linguistics