University of Patras

Arhonto Terzi, Konstantinos Francis, Evia Kainada, Anthi Zafeiri

Arhonto Terzi is a full professor of Linguistics, chair of the Department of Speech and Language Therapy, and director of the Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics Lab. She has worked on syntactic theory (control and raising in non-finite sentences, clitic pronouns, spatial expressions) and language acquisition (control, passives, spatial expressions). She has also investigated various aspects of the grammar of children with SLI, Broca’s aphasics and patients with Parkinson’s disease, with an interest in what language impairments can tell us about the faculty of language, and how linguistic theory can assist intervention. During the past five years she has coordinated an interdisciplinary team (Konstantinos Francis, M.D., Ph.D., Child Psychiatrist, Evia Kainada, Ph.D., Phonetician/Laboratory Phonologist, Anthi Zafeiri, M.A., Linguistics, B.Sc., Speech Language Pathology) with two research grants on the language abilities of high-functioning children with autism (112.000€ total), leading to a number of international publications in collaboration with Theo Marinis in top journals such as Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Language Acquisition, Psychology.
Terzi’s team focuses on disentangling the role of prosody and pragmatics in focus structures, clitic left dislocation structures, and other structures involving (or prohibiting) clitic pronouns. Furthermore, she is interested in syntactically (vs. morphologically) expressed evidentiality and its relation to Theory of Mind.