Dr. Panayiotis Pappas
I am an associate professor at SFU where I have worked since 2002, after receiving my PhD from The Ohio State University under the supervision of Brian Joseph. My thesis looks at the phenomenon of weak pronoun (clitic) placement in Later Medieval Greek and examines the influence of internal factors based on the statistical analysis of tokens in a large corpus of vernacular texts. Since then I have conducted variationist analysis on the palatalization of /l/ and /n/ in Patras and Kephalonia Greek, the pattern of clitic placement in Modern Cypriot Greek, and the variable pronunciation of the palatal lateral as a palatal fricative in Cypriot Greek. Together with Arne Mooers (SFU, Biology) we have investigated the effect of lexical frequency on the development of the vocabulary of Greek. I am currently working on establishing a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews for BC English.