Dr Vassiliki Geka

Vassiliki (Bessy) Geka

Part-Time Lecturer, UNIC Athens

Vassiliki (Bessy) Geka is a Lecturer at UNIC Athens, where she is currently teaching Business and Professional Communication (COMM-200) and Technical Writing and Research (BADM-332). She holds a PhD in Linguistics (2021), an MA in Applied Linguistics (2011), and a BA in English and Greek Language and Literature (2009) from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). Her doctoral research examined how dialogic constructions contribute to the organization of discourse, drawing on extensive corpus-based analysis.

She is also a Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics at NKUA (Department of English language and literature). Her current work focuses on investigating language change and linguistic creativity both from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. In particular, she works on cognition verbs from a corpus-based diachronic perspective, including variation between that- and zero complementation, while she has also worked on constructional variation and creativity in multimodal meaning-making practices (e.g., internet memes). Her broader research interests include Construction Grammar, Cognitive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, pragmatics, discourse organisation, and multimodal meaning-making. Her postdoctoral research has formed part of a project funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation on a corpus-based valency lexicon for the contrastive and diachronic study of ancient and medieval languages.

Her monograph, Imperative-Based Dialogic Constructions and Discourse Units, was published by John Benjamins in 2025. Her research has appeared in the Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Constructions, the Journal of Greek Linguistics, and the Journal of Internet Pragmatics, among other venues. She is a co-editor, along with Nikolaos Lavidas and Kiki Nikiforidou, of the forthcoming volume Genres, Influential Texts and Language Change: Exploring Cross-Fertilising Effects (De Gruyter Mouton). She has presented her work in several international conferences on Cognitive Linguistics, Pragmatics, Construction Grammar, and Corpus Research.

Alongside her research, Dr. Geka has taught English for specific and academic purposes at the University of West Attica, the University of Patras, the Hellenic Air Force Academy, the Air Force NCO Academy, the National School of Public Administration and the Hellenic Police Academy. She has developed teaching materials and assessments for professional and institutional contexts. At the Hellenic American Union, she is the Director of Education, overseeing the Centre for Academic and Educational Programmes as well as the Centre for Language Studies.

Her academic service includes reviewing for the Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, and The European Journal of Humour Research; organizing scholarly workshops and seminars; and contributing to language assessment and professional training. She has also given invited talks on cognition verbs, complementiser choice, Construction Grammar, and corpus-based methods at NKUA and for the Hellenic Association for the Study of English. Her work brings together empirical linguistic research, academic teaching, and the design of communication-focused learning experiences.