Dr. Shirly Orr was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue her research project, “The effect of the (dis)trust mindset on the construction of meaning and attribution of truth”. In this project, Orr plans to empirically investigate the relationship between “truth” and “meaning”, focusing on how “trust” modulates that relationship. Her aim is to shed light on the dynamic process of constructing meaning under different goals and mindsets.

Orr earned her BA in Hebrew and Semitic languages from Bar-Ilan University and an MA in Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. She completed both her MA thesis and PhD dissertation in linguistics at Tel Aviv University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Predicating Truth: An Empirical Investigation”, explored the concept of truth by studying its use in natural interaction (e.g., the use of “true” in discourse) and its connection to other concepts (e.g., the relationship between truth and agreement). Her work—then and now—seeks to offer a different perspective on truth, one grounded in empirical inquiry and shaped by an interactional usage-based approach.

Orr, S., Ariel, M., & Shetreet, E. (2024). Scales and inferences. Language and Cognition 16(4), 1899–1924. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2024.36

Orr, S., & Ariel, M. (2021). Predicating Truth: An empirically based analysis. Journal of Pragmatics, 185, 131–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.09.005

Orr, S., Ariel, M., & Peleg, O. (2017). The case of literally true propositions with false implicatures. In I. Chiluwa (Ed.), Deception and Deceptive Communication: Motivations, Recognition Techniques and Behavioral Control (pp. 67–107). Nova Science Publishers.