Dr. Francesco Saccà joined the Romance Linguistics department on April 1

Since April 1, Dr. Francesco Saccà has been working as a Research Associate at the Chair of Romance Linguistics (French/Italian), which is currently held by PD Dr. habil. Franz Meier. Francesco Saccà's postdoctoral project "Sound Symbolism and Synesthesia in Multimodal Texts Generated by LLMs" deals with aspects of iconicity in uni- and multimodal texts generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). To carry out this project, he can build on his dissertation on phonosymbolism in modern advertising and propaganda language, which he completed in January 2026 at the Università degli Studi della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli" in the field of Storia e trasmissione delle eredità culturali with a specialization in Italian linguistics and philology. Francesco Saccà studied Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Pisa (Bachelor) and Cognitive and Cultural Linguistics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Master). His core research areas are iconicity, persuasive communication and automatic text generation. He is also interested in Italian satirical journalism with a particular focus on contemporary history as part of his work on the IMPUDENS (Italian Mocking Pens) project.