The roles of linguistic meaning and context in the concept of lying

This dissertation adopts an experimental approach to studying lie judgments. It focuses on lie judgments to different types of meaning within a pragmatic framework – namely bare linguistic meaning, explicature, and implicature – to study whether the (in)directness of communicated false content affects the extent to which an utterance is judged as a lie. In addition, it manipulates several contextual factors – namely the genre of discourse, pre-existing biases towards the speaker, the speaker’s intention to deceive, and the stakes of the situation – to investigate the extent to which these extralinguistic contextual factors affect lie judgments as well. Lastly, the project includes a reaction time experiment designed to investigate the mental representations of the categories of lie and mislead and how false explicatures and false implicatures are categorized. In exploring the variability in lie judgments, I gather evidence that support amendments to the discussion of lie judgments in the linguistic literature and additionally draw conclusions relevant to the broader discussion of frameworks of linguistic meaning.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2020

Author dc:creator

• Weissman, Benjamin Philip

Contributors dc:contributor

• Terkourafi, Marina
• Ionin, Tania
• Lasersohn, Peter
• Tanner, Darren

• Linguistics
• Pragmatics
• Lying
• Sociolinguistics
• Bias
• Deception

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Benjamin Weissman

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106230

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/106230