New grant from RJ!

Published 31 October 2022
black and white picture of a sign hanging over stairs. The sign says "Humanistlaboratoriet".

Joost van de Weijer (LU Humanities Lab) and Roberta Colonna Dahlman (Italian Studies, Centre for Languages and Literature) has been a awarded a grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) for the project "Experimenting on factivity. An investigation into the prosody of factive sentences".

When we speak, there is often a surplus of content which is not expressed explicitly in the message. The implication of an utterance such as "Jim knows that Sue lives in Rome", for instance, is that it is true that Sue lives in Rome. The focus of the project is on utterances where this implication is not necessarily fulfilled, as in the utterance "In the middle ages, everyone knew that the earth was flat". We will compare the production and the perception of these two utterance types in Italian as well as in English. These languages make up an interesting pair for comparison because results from our previous studies have shown that an unfulfilled truthfulness implication is much more acceptable in Italian than what it is in English.