Vidi research grant for Emar Maier

Emar Maier , researcher in Philosophy of Language & Formal Semantics at the Faculty of Philosophy, has been awarded a Vidi research grant of € 800.000 by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO for his research project The Language of Fiction and Imagination.

Maier had already received an ERC Starting Grant for his project 'Between direct and indirect discourse - Shifting perspective in blended discourse' in 2010.

The Language of Fiction and Imagination

When I tell you a wizard has been helping me write my grant proposal, you’ll think I’ve gone crazy. But when a novelist writes about a school for wizards in the English countryside, nobody bats an eye. In the context of a fiction, all the usual expectations of truth and reference are out the window, yet we can still interpret the text and even be emotionally involved with the characters described. The aim of the present project is to develop a formally explicit account of fiction interpretation that explains this fundamental difference between fiction and everyday communication.

With the NWO Vidi research grant, two PhD's can be appointed for five years.

Emar Maier's personal website

This article was published by the Faculty of Philosophy.

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