Professor Spyridoula Bella is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, specializing in Pragmatics and Second Language Teaching. She studied Linguistics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, completed her Master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Reading (United Kingdom), and earned her PhD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens with a dissertation on deixis in Modern Greek.

Her teaching and research focus on pragmatics, semantics, second and foreign language acquisition and teaching, as well as applied linguistics. She has taught for many years in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and has made a significant contribution to the teaching of Greek as a second and foreign language to international students, educators, and scholarship recipients from numerous countries

Selected Publications:

Bella, S. (2005). Cognitive motivation and pragmatic functions of the Greek deictics. Journal of Greek Linguistics, 6, 39–60.

Bella, S. (2009). Invitations and politeness in Greek: the age variable. Journal of Politeness Research, 5(2), 243–271.

Bella, S. (2011). Mitigation and politeness in Greek invitation refusals: Effects of length of residence in the target community and intensity of interaction on non-native speakers’ performance. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1718–1740.

Bella, S., Ogiermann, E. κ.ά. (2022). Accounts as acts of identity: Justifying business closures on COVID-19 public signs in Athens and London. Pragmatics, 32, 620–647.

Email: sbella@phil.uoa.gr