Gina Scarpete Walters

Gina Scarpete Walters advocates for linguistic and cultural diversity and less commonly taught languages. She is one of the recipients of the 2022 NFMLTA-NCOLCTL Graduate Research Support Grant and a Title VIII Fellow in 2023. Gina is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Comparative Culture and Language program, focusing primarily on languages of the Balkans, conceptualizations of body part terms in culturally specific ways, and figurative language in foreign language instruction. Her main research interests lie in cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, Balkan linguistics, more specifically, cross-cultural semantics and lexicology, human body metaphors, emotion metaphors, the universality of metaphors, and variation in metaphors 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. 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. 

She holds two Graduate Certificates in Psychopedagogy, with a focus on teaching Modern Greek as a Foreign/Second Language and Romanian as a First Language, from the Teacher Training Department of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (University of Bucharest); and a Certificate of language skills in Modern Greek issued by the Ministry of Education of Greece, through the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Gina is also a certified Modern Greek and English translator, authorized by the Romanian Ministry of Justice. 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0226-0354

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