About

Gina is a third-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Comparative Culture and Language program, focusing primarily on conceptualizations of body part terms in culturally specific ways and figurative language in foreign language instruction. Although her main research interests lie in the area of cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics (cross-cultural semantics and lexicology, human body metaphors, emotion metaphors, the universality of metaphors and variation in metaphor both across and within cultures), she is also interested in semantic change, etymology, grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and discourse markers. Gina also serves as a Graduate Teaching Associate of Linguistics for ASU’s School of International Letters and Cultures. Prior to her arrival at ASU, Gina served as a graduate teaching assistant for the Department of Modern Greek Studies and Classical Philology at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she taught Modern Greek. She did one Master’s thesis on qualitative classifiers in old Romanian documents (16th-18th centuries) (written in Romanian) and another on idioms about the human body in Modern Greek and Romanian (written in Modern Greek), both at the University of Bucharest.