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

Weissman, Benjamin Philip

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Description

Title

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

Author(s)

Weissman, Benjamin Philip

Issue Date

2019-12-02

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Terkourafi, Marina

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Ionin, Tania

Committee Member(s)

• Lasersohn, Peter
• Tanner, Darren

Department of Study

Linguistics

Discipline

Linguistics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

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

Abstract

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.

Graduation Semester

2019-12

Type of Resource

text

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Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2019 Benjamin Weissman

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