Eirini Sossidi

Visiting fellow (January 2026, A05, MGK)
Project: Hyperbole and understatement as register-sensitive politeness strategies

Eirini Sossidi has an interdisciplinary background spanning philology, linguistics, and cognitive science. Her main area of interest is experimental pragmatics, with a sustained focus on figurative language, challenging the alleged priority of literal meaning in interpretation and restoring affect to a central position in language.

She completed an MA in Linguistics at University College London, where she worked with Richard Breheny on cross-modal priming studies of metaphor interpretation, experimentally testing predictions of Sperber and Wilson’s Continuity theory. After graduation, she continued this line of research as an Honorary Research Assistant at UCL.

She subsequently pursued a Master’s degree in Cognitive Sciences (Ecole Normale Supérieure–PSL & EHESS) and joined Benjamin Spector’s LINGUAE group at the Institut Jean Nicod. There, she worked on hyperbole interpretation, posing a novel theoretical question about its semantic nature. Using forced-choice and inference-judgement experiments in complex syntactic environments, her work challenges meaning-activation assumptions in probabilistic models of interpretation. This work was presented at XPrag 2025 (Cambridge).

From January 2026, Eirini is a research fellow within CRC 1412 Register. She is affiliated with Project A05 (Modelling Meaning-Driven Register Variation), working with Uli Sauerland and Stephanie Solt. Her project investigates how hyperbole and understatement function as alternative politeness strategies across registers and hierarchical relations.

Projects

MGK Integrated Graduate School
A05 Modeling meaning-driven register variation: Politeness and face management

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