Anastasia Giannakidou is the Frank J. McLoraine Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago, director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, and co-director of the University’s Center for Gesture, Sign and Language. She has been a Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and served at the Faculty Board of the University’s Institute for the Formation of Knowledge.
Anastasia works at the intersection of linguistic semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language and studies how meaning is reflected in grammar, how speakers use language to persuade and deceive, and what ultimately the relation is between language, thought and reality. Besides Greek, she has done comparative work on Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Basque, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese.
In her first book Polarity Sensitivity as Nonveridical Dependency, which built on her PhD research, Anastasia developed a comprehensive theory of polarity phenomena in language by introducing the notion of (non)veridicality. Nonveridicality is a cognitive state of uncertainty, and the leading idea in this book is that the distribution of indefinite expressions such as English any> and Greek indefinite kanenas depends on whether they are found in a nonveridical context. The theory found many applications in a variety of language including Korean, Mandarin, and of course also other Indo-European languages. In her most recent book, Truth and veridicality in Grammar and Thought, The University of Chicago Press (in collaboration with Alda Mari), Anastasia explores further the question of how truth judgments are formed, and to what extent they are affected by objective and subjective perceptions of reality. The book concludes that the difference between knowledge and belief (opinion) remains solidly encoded in the grammar as we can see with mood choice, namely subjunctive versus indicative. Anastasia and Alda are currently working on a new book Modal Sentences to appear with Cambridge University Press.
In her work as the director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Anastasia pursues an interdisciplinary agenda creating synergies between the academic fields (Linguistics, Classics, Philosophy, Psychology, Ethics, Political Science) that engage with Hellenic ideas— in the hope of developing a framework for knowledge and human flourishing that will create better conditions for understanding and will therefore benefit humanity. She supports the teaching of Modern Greek at the University of Chicago, as well as in the schools of the Hellenic diaspora. She has collaborated with the National Hellenic Museum, the Hellenic Research Center for Asia Minor and Pontos, and the Panhellenic Scholasrhip Foundation.