Doctor Napoleon Katsos
Nationality: Greece
Year: 2005
Subject Area: Arts and Humanities
Website: Visit (opens in a new window)Thanks to a Wingate Scholarship I had the opportunity to work on a project on ‘Experimental Rhetoric: litotes and quantification’. Litotes is a figure of speech related to understatement, where the assertion of two negative expressions is used instead of the contrary or contradictory affirmation. Litotes is not uncommon in everyday conversation, yet it is not well understood which linguistic factors affect how a double negative is interpreted. E.g. in the previous sentence “not uncommon” can be understood literally as ‘it is not the case that it is uncommon’, or with additional strengthening ‘in fact, it is quite common’. In this project I proposed an account that relies on the pragmatic theories of Grice and Searle, and I suggested ways to experimentally test these predictions. The Wingate Foundation funded me for 5 months immediately after finishing my PhD degree. Their support was instrumental in helping me obtain my first appointment in academia as a Research Associate at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge.