When children aren't more logical than adults: An empirical investigation of lying by falsely implicating

Journal of Pragmatics 138 (2018) 135e148

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When children aren't more logical than adults: An empirical investigation of lying by falsely implicating* Mailin Antomo*, Susanne Müller, Katharina Paul, Markus Paluch, Maik Thalmann €t Go €te-Hamburger-Weg 3, 37073 Go €ttingen, Department of German Philology, Ka €ttingen, Germany Georg-August-Universita

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 10 April 2018 Received in revised form 21 September 2018 Accepted 23 September 2018

Studies on whether lying, as opposed to merely deceiving, is possible with untruthful implicatures have found conflicting evidence. Here, we present two experiments in which we investigated whether untruthful implicatures are judged as lies and the alleged difference between untruthful generalized and particularized conversational implicatures. Furthermore, we investigated untruthful implicatures in language acquisition. Our results show first that false implicatures are categorized as lies, but also that participants differentiate between false asserted content and false implicatures. Second, there is no contrast between PCIs and GCIs in either truthful or untruthful usage. Third, our results reveal an overall similar performance across all three tested age groups (5e6 years, 8e9 years, adults), showing that inferred content is accessible earlier than originally thought. We argue that these results are due to the child-oriented material as well as the high relevance of the implicatures in our experiment, and that previous findings in conflict with our own are caused by children's pragmatic tolerance. © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Dataset link: https://doi.org/10.17632/ xgbjr735m7.1 Keywords: Untruthful implicatures GCIs and PCIs Implicatures in language acquisition

1. Introduction and theoretical background Consider first, by way of illustration, Posner's (1980) now-famous example in Meibauer's (2005:1380) adapted version: (1)

A captain and his mate have a long-term quarrel. The mate drinks more rum than is good for him, and the captain is determined not to tolerate this behaviour any longer. When the mate is drunk again, the captain writes into the logbook: Today, 11th October, the mate is drunk. When the mate reads this entry during his next watch, he is first getting angry, then, after a short moment of reflection, he writes into the logbook: Today, 14th October, the captain is not drunk.

A point of much scholarly contention in recent years, as well as the purpose of the present study, concerns the final logbook entry: while the asserted proposition is truthful, the implicature, namely the exceptionality of the captain's sobriety that day, is not. In this context, the question whether such implicatures are suitable for lying has been answered in various * This research project was funded within the frame of FoLL (“Forschungsorientiertes Lehren und Lernen”, roughly translated: ‘Research Oriented € ttingen and financed by the Federal Ministry of Teaching and Learning’), which is part of the “Campus Q Plus”-program at the Georg-August-University Go Education and Research (# 01PL16061). We are very grateful to Susanne Wimmelmann, the coordinator of FoLL, Pia Büsse, Mike Grauer, Nele Sattler, Linda € rg Schleef, Helen Schmidtberg, and Ann-Kathrin Schütt for their help in creating the stimuli and testing the participants as well as Markus Steinbach, Jo Meibauer, and Thomas Weskott for their useful comments, suggestions and criticisms. Lastly, we would like to thank our two anonymous reviewers. All usual disclaimers apply. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Antomo).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.09.010 0378-2166/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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ways. One reason for this controversy stems from the fact that lying is traditionally deemed a semantic phenomenon, as evident in the classical definition of Mahon (2015): (2)

To lie ¼

df

to make a believed-false statement to another person with the intention that the other person believe that statement to be true.

This account thus champions the speaker's belief state as opposed to any objectively attained falsity (Mahon's Untruthfulness Condition), but only in the realm of what is said, i.e. the semantic meaning in terms of Grice (1989). A natural followup question hence concerns implicatures: can they successfully be employed for lying? Recent treatments in the pragmatics literature range from affirmative to negative answers and cover both theoretical (in favor: Falkenberg, 1982, Vincent and Castelfranchi, 1981, who introduce the notion of indirect lying, and Meibauer, 2005, 2011, 2014, 2015; dissenting: Saul, 2012; Horn, 2017a,b, among others; see Dynel, 2015 for an overview) and experimental studies (in favor: Willemsen and Wiegmann, 2017; Wiegmann et al., 2017; dissenting: Weissman and Terkourafi, 2018).1 For a recent overview, we refer the reader to Meibauer (2018). In the following, we will review the most prominent arguments of both positions. Meibauer motivates his inclusion of untruthful implicatures under the concept of lies in the following way2: conversational implicatures constitute additional propositions with their own separate truth value. As they are intended by the speaker S and rely on the asserted proposition, S is committed to their meaning contribution, which satisfies the Untruthfulness Condition. As a result of this commitment, Meibauer (2005, 2014) suggests the following Extended Definition of Lying, thereby including false implicatures: (3)

S lied at t by uttering the declarative sentence s iff (a) S asserted at t that p, (b) S actively believed at t that not p, (c) or S thereby conversationally implicated that q, but actively believed that not q.

This theoretical perspective was tested empirically by Willemsen and Wiegmann (2017), who investigated untruthful quantity, relation, and manner implicatures, the latter comprised of the omission, order, ambiguity, and obscurity of expression varieties. Implicated propositions, they conclude, are found by participants to qualify as lies d evaluative options were designed in a binary fashion, “I (rather) agree” and “I (rather) disagree”. They surmise: What seems to be at the heart of people's concept of lying is that the speaker believes to create a belief in the addressee which he himself believes to be false. Whether this false belief is the result of a wrong statement or a false implicature seems to be secondary. (…) Lying occurs at the level of pragmatics. [T]he Untruthfulness Condition seems more appropriately understood at the level of pragmatics. (Willemsen and Wiegmann, 2017: 3521) While offering support for the position that both asserted and implicated content can be used to lie, the study leaves open, due to the binary response options, the determination of nuance between the two delivery methods, and offers no insight into subclasses of the implicature phenomenon, that is, particularized (PCI) and generalized conversational implicatures (GCI), both points to which we will return below. As for accounts that intend to uphold the semantic classification of lying, the main arguments are as follows: untruthful implicatures constitute a deceptive/misleading use of language and cannot be regarded as instantiations of lies. Horn (2017a:155) posits that contrasts like in the following examples show that misleading and deceiving, in contrast to proper lies, are perlocutionary, in that they are defined by their effect on the addressee. False implicatures, therefore, behave much more like deceptive or misleading uses of language than lies. (4)

(a) Don't let the blue sky mislead/deceive/#lie to you e it's bitterly cold outside. (b) She #misled/#deceived/lied to me, but I didn't believe her for a minute.

Another point of contention is put forth by Saul (2012), who argues that untruthful implicatures are not to be subsumed under lying since any such practice would blur the distinction between what is said and what is implicated. Specifically, speaker commitment holds to a different degree for assertions than for implicatures arising from the asserted content, a prime characteristic of implicatures being their cancelability. Finally, Horn (2017a,b) argues that in legal discourse, the notion of lie is restricted to cases where an untruthful proposition is asserted and that, if the definition of lie is expanded to include non-asserted content, it is hard to know where to stop. Empirical support for the classical position on lying is lent by Weissman and Terkourafi's (2018) investigation of 11 GCIs and 4 PCIs. Participants consistently evaluated only implicatures triggered by cardinal numbers and repetitions (N and N, V and V) as lies (7-point Likert scale: Did X lie?). However, as Meibauer (2018:365) points out, some of the presented false

1

This exposition of approaches is restricted to the pragmatic literature and will not consider philosophical work. Though Meibauer (2014:135f) uses the term intentionally false implicature, we will use untruthful implicature throughout this article to highlight Mahon's Untruthfulness Condition. 2

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implicatures (like their example 3 on page 163), in contrast to straightforward lies, were devoid of a motive for the lie, thus calling into question the conclusion. Note, furthermore, that there are strong arguments that bare numerals do not license scalar implicatures at all which would explain the empirical findings of Weissman and Terkourafi (2018). We will return to this point below. A further question that, albeit to a lesser extent, was engaged within the pragmatics literature is whether there exists a qualitative difference between PCIs and GCIs in the realm of lies. To highlight the key disparities, consider (5): (5)

A: Is John home already? B: Some of the guest have left already.

Adopting the terminology of a neo-Gricean view, we assume that the meaning contribution of the PCI, i.e. “it might be the case that John has left already”, is highly dependent on the utterance context and has to be derived via an inferential process (cf. Grice, 1989). The content of the scalar GCI “not all guests have left”, on the other hand, constitutes a default interpretation d but contextual facts may yield an exception d which is not as context sensitive; rather, it is tied to certain lexical items. Following Horn (1972) and Grice (1975), in our example, the choice of the weak term some implicates the negation of the more informative lexeme all. In the neo-Gricean account of Levinson (2000), other GCIs include I-implicatures (such as conjunction buttressing) and M-implicatures. The distinction between GCIs and PCIs is, however, challenged by post-Gricean pragmatics such as Relevance Theory as proposed by Wilson and Sperber (2004) and Carston (2004). Can the investigation of deception contribute towards either reaffirming or refuting the theoretical distinction between GCI and PCI? How, if at all, do the discrepancies between GCIs and PCIs factor into untruthful uses? Adopting a neo-Gricean view, differences between GCIs and PCIs in their suitability for lying should be expected. For example, Meibauer (2005), who is working within a neo-Gricean framework, argues that GCIs can be employed for lying and suggests furthermore that PCIs “are harder to cancel and more difficult to calculate than GCIs”, potentially causing PCI-induced lies to be considered a greater deception (see Meibauer, 2005:1391). He, therefore, argues that the increased processing effort of the deceitful part of the utterance results in a more severe breach of conversational conduct. Weissman and Terkourafi (2018), too, work within a neoGricean framework; however, in contrast to Meibauer (2005), they conclude that PCIs, in opposition to generalized implicatures, are not suited for lying. On the other hand, according to the framework Relevance theory, untruthful PCIs and GCIs are expected to be judged alike in deceptive contexts. This distinction, however, might not rest solely on the (kind of) implicature itself, but instead on external factors such as transparency of deceptive motive and contextual relevance of the implicature. Though the latter point has not been defined in detail, one factor we believe has to be accounted for is at-issueness, that is, whether the implicated content answers the Question Under Discussion (QUD) (von Stutterheim and Klein, 1989; Roberts, 1996; Simons et al., 2010 among others). More concretely, we take the shared goal of interlocutors to be an increase in shared knowledge, commonly referred to as the common ground. Content that is at-issue because it answers the QUD is relevant and we assume at least this property to be crucially involved when talking about the relevance of an utterance. Concerning the contextual relevance of implicated content, Jaszczolt (2009) argues that there are fundamental differences between implicatures functioning as primary meaning and implicatures functioning as secondary meaning. She shows that the cancelability of implicated content improves in cases where the implicature expresses the “main meaning”, which Jaszczolt (2009) detects through questioneanswer pairs, reminiscent of question-based discourse models as proposed by Roberts (1996). Adjusting for both relevance and deceptive motive, we intend to show in the course of this investigation, generates more robust judgments, particularly when participants are not directly affected by the deception, but are merely observers. Apart from the arguments surveyed above with respect to the interaction between implicatures and lies, a crucial factor concerns acquisitional aspects of the two phenomena. At around 4 years of age, children acquire the so-called Theory of Mind (ToM), enabling them to represent intentional and more general mental states of the individuals around them in abstraction to their own (for discussion, see De Villiers, 2007; Cummings, 2017). In the following, we will briefly review this process in order to relate both linguistic capacities. Several studies investigated the acquisitional process, and in particular its time course, of GCIs (Noveck, 2001; Chierchia €hrig, 2010) and conclude in relative unison that children acquire them at around 7 years of et al., 2005; Guasti et al., 2005; Ro age. Similar results were obtained for PCIs (Bernicot et al., 2007; Verbuk and Schultz, 2010), but note that the particular task and the introduction (or omission) of training portions create significant variation within the elicited data (cf. Papafragou and Musolino, 2003; Chierchia et al., 2005), again giving credence to the view that external factors other than pragmatic ability are to be considered. In particular, Papafragou and Tantalou (2004) showed that, given appropriate salience e and contextual relevance e, children as young as 4 years of age derive GCI-enriched meanings. Indeed, some experiments suggest that children are able to derive inferred meanings as early as 3 years of age and are simply more tolerant of pragmatic violations which tends to mask their competence in experimental tasks (Katsos and Bishop, 2011; Shetreet et al., 2014; Panizza et al. submitted). Oddity effects arising through the computation of a GCI in sentences like “some elephants are mammals” of the type considered in Noveck (2001) might be an example of this tolerance phenomenon. Again, it seems that a high degree of conversational relevance is required of the experimental items and task to ensure adequate computation.

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Deceptive competence, on the other hand, arises in several stages during childhood. Supporting the timing of implicature acquisition, studies employing the Temptation Resistance Paradigm show that a considerable part of 3-year-olds lie actively (Lewis et al., 1989; Talwar and Lee, 2002). In spite of this general proficiency, children at that age are barely capable of avoiding inconsistencies when questioned e a capacity known as semantic leakage control, likely to be caused by general limitations of cognition, which is more firmly established only at age 7 or 8 (see Talwar and Lee, 2008). In a similar vein, moral reprehensibility of lying behavior is recognized from 4 years (with differing evaluations for prosocial lies featuring at 7 years) (Talwar and Lee, 2002; Lee, 2013). While these facts about the acquisition of lies are relatively non-controversial, the overlap with implicated propositions is, at this time, uncharted territory. In closing, numerous questions still remain unanswered or controversial, despite continued scholarly attention. In the following, we present two experimental studies: As a first step, we investigate whether untruthful implicatures are considered lies (here, in particular, results are contradictory), whether the (neo-)Gricean distinction between GCIs and PCIs is tenable in deceptive uses, and whether it affects judgments. Experiment II addresses the question of how the developmental stage impacts the perception of untruthful implicatures and their evaluation as lies. The final question has, as of yet, not been dealt with empirically and marks a key point of the present study. 2. Experiment design 2.1. Experiment I The aim of our first experiment was to assess whether implicatures can be considered lies and whether there is a difference between the assessment of GCIs and PCIs in untruthful cases of use. Therefore, we conducted an offline rating experiment using the open source software OnExp. 30 adult participants first watched a video in which a story was told. The experimental method followed that of Coleman and Kay (1981) in that, in each story, one of the characters told either the truth or engaged in deceptive behavior using an assertion, a GCI or a PCI. Afterwards, the participants rated if the character in the story was lying on a 5-point Likert scale (1 ¼ lie, 5 ¼ truth). 2.1.1. Participants We tested 30 participants (22 female and 8 male) between 19 and 76 years of age (mean ¼ 35.1 ± 16.86 years). All were native German speakers from different regions in Germany with different social backgrounds. For their participation, they received 5 Euro. 2.1.2. Material Each participant was presented with 24 critical items, 12 control and filler items (comprised of 6 truthful and 6 untruthful assertions), and 3 practice items (1 truthful and 2 untruthful assertions), all of which were in German. The critical items consisted of 6 truthful and 6 untruthful PCIs and 6 truthful and 6 untruthful GCIs. As for the PCIs, we only tested Relevance implicatures (for illustration, see example (6)), since Quality implicatures such as irony or metaphors in an untruthful usage might have been too complex, especially for the younger participants in Experiment 2. Furthermore, it is difficult to control prosody effects in the context of Quality implicatures. The test items for the GCIs consisted of Qimplicatures (scalar implicatures, see example (8)), I-implicatures (conjunction buttressing), and M-implicatures in terms of Levinson (2000). We decided to include one item involving a bare numeral since there are different approaches to the interpretation of bare numerals and to the question of whether they give rise to a scalar implicature (for an overview see Spector, 2013). If the item involving the bare numeral is judged more like the items involving assertions than the items involving implicatures (as seen in Weissman and Terkourafi, 2018), this argues against the neo-Gricean view according to which the “exactly n” reading results from a pragmatic process (i.e. a scalar implicature) (concerning the results of this item, see footnote13). Every target sentence was embedded into a short story. The plots were created in accordance with similar research studies (see Talwar et al., 2016) and featured situations familiar to the younger participants, except for the GCI items, as these were created for the adults exclusively. At the end of each story, one of the protagonists uttered the target sentence, which was to be evaluated by the participants. Typically, the target sentence was preceded by a question, which corresponds to the QUD. In the critical items, the asserted proposition did not target the QUD, whereas the implicated content was relevant with respect to the QUD and was therefore at-issue (von Stutterheim and Klein, 1989; Roberts, 1996; Simons et al., 2010 among others). Using this configuration, we tried to guarantee that the meaning contribution of all implicatures is highly relevant since every target implicature expressed at-issue content (or the “main meaning” in terms of Jaszczolt, 2009).3 Furthermore, we aimed for a clearly identifiable motive for every (potential) lie; prosocial lies, as they belong to a different category altogether, were excluded.

3 In two stories (3.7 and 3.10), no question was asked, but the context (e.g. a bet in 3.7) ensured and made obvious the implicature's at-issue status. One anonymous reviewer pointed out the need for a pretest of our material to determine stability across stories, e.g. by collecting lie motivation ratings. However, our results indicate that refraining from the pretests was not harmful, a reason for this being that every implicature expressed at-issue content.

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We created a set of protagonists of which at least two were included in each story. To avoid partial judgments, especially with the younger participants (see Experiment 2), we had either two girls or two boys as main protagonists. Optionally, there was a cat with the girls or a dog with the boys and in some stories, the mother or the father of one of the children was present. The gender proportion as well as the ratio of deceiving characters was balanced. The items were presented as video sequences (from 18 to 39 s in length) that combined both a sound track of the story and visual support in the form of hand-drawn pictures. The recordings were conducted in a soundproof room and digitized at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate in a 16-bit mono format.4 A e translated e example of an untruthful PCI tape is provided here for illustration:

(7)e(8) display an example for a false assertion and an untruthful GCI, respectively5:

(7) (8)

Otto and Paul are playing together. When Paul is not in the room, Otto accidently drops Paul's soccer trophy. Paul's dog Fido comes into the room and a few moments later, Paul comes in, too. He asks: “Oh no, who was that?” Otto responds: “Fido threw the trophy down.” Otto and Paul are both members of the soccer club. On the weekend, they play against a team from a town nearby. Otto scores a lot and is praised by everyone because he plays exceptionally well. Paul, on the other hand, sits on the bench almost the entire time and is jealous of Otto. In the evening over dinner, Paul's mother asks: “How did Otto do today?” Paul responds: “Otto played o.k.”

2.1.3. Design and predictions The study featured a 2  3 within subject, between item design with the two factors TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False) and DIRECTNESS (Assertion vs. GCI vs. PCI).6 In accordance with Meibauer's (2014) assumption that implicatures can be employed for lying and adopting a neo-Gricean framework, we predicted a significant difference between the ratings for truthful and untruthful GCIs and PCIs.7 Since GCIs are relatively context independent and are consistently associated with certain linguistic

4 We tried to keep the prosody as natural as possible but we cannot exclude that any prosody effects might have affected interpretation. Since we have a between-items and within-subjects design, this factor carried no weight. 5 A full list of the used material is uploaded to the data repository (Mendeley Data) and can be consulted via the digital object identifier (https://doi.org/ 10.17632/xgbjr735m7.1). 6 We refrained from a within-items design where the same recorded utterance would be placed in different stories because the context dependence of the implicatures made it impossible to control that the same implicature (with differing truth values) is triggered consistently and in a natural way. 7 In the context of this experiment, false and untruthful are synonymous because any objectively false utterance (and its associated implicature) coincides with an untruthful speaker. The same holds for true and truthful.

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forms, we assumed that GCIs would be judged similarly to assertions. That means that untruthful GCIs would be rated more as lies in comparison to untruthful PCIs. In contrast with false assertions however, we predicted untruthful implicatures of any type to be less suitable for lying. Therefore, we expected a significant difference for every factor and their interaction. 2.1.4. Procedure The entire experiment was programmed with OnExp Version 1.3.1. The participants were tested individually using a computer in a quiet room under supervision of an examiner. Participants were first introduced to the protagonists of the stories and completed three practice items to familiarize themselves with the appropriate use of the scale. If necessary, repeated completion of the practice items was possible. After the participants had made their choice, they were asked to elaborate on their judgment to make sure that the task as well as the scale were understood properly. Next, the adults completed 36 trials in randomized order. At the end of each trial, one of the protagonists uttered the target sentence and the already familiar Likert scale from 1 to 5 appeared. To be suitable for children (see Experiment 2), the points on the scale were coded as smiley faces (adopting Ambridge's 2010 approach, see Fig. 1):

Fig. 1. The scale used to rate whether the critical utterance was a lie.

To rate the critical sentence, the participants pointed out one of the smileys, thus answering the examiner's question “Was the last sentence a lie?” in the following way: the bright red frowny face on the left equaled “Yes, it was a lie” (which corresponds to a 1) and the bright green smiley face corresponded to “No, it was not a lie” (corresponding to a 5).8 This procedure was repeated for all items, yielding a total duration of approximately 30 min. 2.1.5. Data analysis For the statistical analysis, we conducted a mixed-effect ordinal regression analysis with a Laplace approximation, bysubject random intercepts and slopes, as well as by-item random intercepts for the factors TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False) and DIRECTNESS (Assertion vs. GCIs vs. PCIs)9. Since the assertion condition was mainly used as a benchmark and was rated as expected, we additionally computed a post hoc maximal mixed-effect ordinal regression with a Bonferroni correction (confidence level * 2/3) for the factors TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False) and IMPLICATURE (GCIs vs. PCIs). In both cases, we obtained p values for the factors and the interaction via backwards elimination. In addition, we computed similar post hoc mixedeffect ordinal regressions for each factor combination. The confidence levels were adjusted with a Bonferroni correction of 1/6. All regressions were calculated using the statistical software R (version 3.3.1, R Core Team, 2016) by the clmm function from the ordinal package (Christensen, 2015, version 2018.6e28) with the option Hess ¼ T.

2.2. Experiment II In the second experiment, we examined whether there is a difference in the assessment of untruthful implicatures between children and adults. To that end, we repeated experiment 1 with 60 children from two different developmental stages: 30 young children (5e6 years) and 30 older children (8e9 years). In order not to overexert the children, we excluded GCIs from the investigation. In a second step, the results of the children were compared to the outcome of the adult participants (minus the GCI ratings). 2.2.1. Participants We tested 30 five-to-six-year-olds (13 five-year-olds: 9 girls and 4 boys; 17 six-year-olds: 10 girls and 7 boys) and 30 eightto-nine-year-olds (15 eight-year-olds: 10 girls and 5 boys; 15 nine-year-olds: 9 girls and 6 boys). All children were native

8 We are aware of the fact that this scale might have encouraged individuals towards an emotional, moral-oriented rating as opposed to a linguistic one. However, this problem always holds for the evaluation of lying as it is generally understood as ‘morally bad’. As a consequence, a non-coded scale from 1 to 5 or the choice between ‘lie’ and ‘no lie’ would not have canceled out this effect. In addition, this scale is much more appropriate for children than a labeled one. 9 Y ~ Truth Value * Directness þ (1þ (Truth Value * Directness)jSubject) þ (1jItem).

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German speakers from Lower Saxony which were mainly recruited in two primary schools and a kindergarten with written consent forms from the parents. For participation, each child received a book. 2.2.2. Material For Experiment 2, we used the same items as in experiment 1 except for the items featuring GCIs. In sum, the children saw 3 practice items and 12 critical items consisting of 6 true and 6 false PCIs and 12 control and filler items consisting of 6 true and 6 false assertions. 2.2.3. Design and predictions The study consisted of a 2  2  3 design with the two within subject, between item factors TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False) and DIRECTNESS (Assertions vs. PCI) as well as the between subjects, within items factor DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE (Five-to-six-year-olds vs. Eight-to-nine-year-olds vs. Adults). We assumed that untruthful PCIs would be rated higher and that, therefore, the difference in rating between truthful and untruthful PCIs would be smaller than for the assertions. Furthermore, we predicted that there would be rating differences between the age groups: according to previous research on the acquisition of implicatures, we expected younger children to compute fewer implicatures or none at all and, therefore, not to differentiate between PCIs in untruthful usages and those used to tell the truth. Older children, on the other hand, were assumed to distinguish more clearly between either category, even though the difference between truthful and untruthful PCIs should be smaller than for the adults. As a precise definition of pragmatic tolerance is not yet established, we do not engage any predictions of that hypothesis here (but see the general discussion below). In sum, we expected a main effect for all three factors and their interaction. 2.2.4. Procedure Though the procedures of both experiments were the same, with the children, increased care was taken during the practice items to ensure that both the task as well as the scale were properly explained and understood. 2.2.5. Data analysis For the statistical analysis, we conducted a mixed-effect ordinal regression analysis fitted with Laplace approximation. Due to the design, random intercepts were specified for the factors TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False), DIRECTNESS (Assertion vs. PCIs), and DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE (Five-to-six-year-olds vs. Eight-to-nine-year-olds vs. Adults), while by-subject random slopes could only be specified for the factors TRUTH VALUE as well as DIRECTNESS by subject, and by-item random slopes for DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE.10 Furthermore, we analyzed each factor combination with an ordinal regression (Bonferroni correction: confidence level * 1/12) and computed p-values for all factors and their interactions in a similar fashion to the first experiment. 3. Results 3.1. Experiment I The mean ratings11 for all six conditions show the expected pattern. True and untruthful assertions e the control items e show the highest (4.91 ± 0.49) and lowest (1.11 ± 0.61) values close to the extreme points of the scale. Thus, we can conclude that the participants understood the experimental task and rated the remaining items relative to the control condition. By comparison, PCIs show a smaller difference between the levels of TRUTH VALUE (true PCIs: 4.57 ± 0.84; untruthful PCIs: 2.61 ± 1.33), while GCIs bear resemblance to both assertions and PCIs (true GCIs: 4.84 ± 0.48; untruthful GCIs: 2.22 ± 1.42). The results are summarized in Table 1 and are displayed graphically in Fig. 2.

Table 1 Mean ratings ± standard deviation and medians for the factors DIRECTNESS (Assertion vs. GCI vs. PCI) and TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False). False

Assertion GCI PCI

10

True

Mean ± SD

Median

Mean ± SD

Median

1.11 ± 0.61 2.22 ± 1.42 2.61 ± 1.33

1 2 2

4.91 ± 0.49 4.84 ± 0.48 4.57 ± 0.84

5 5 5

Y ~ Truth Value * Directness * Developmental Stage þ (1þ (Truth Value * Directness)jSubject) þ (1 þ Developmental StagejItem). Since our data (ratings on a five-point Likert scale) are non-parametric, means are not ideal to describe our results. However, they provide a better summary to see the pattern than non-parametric characteristics like medians. Therefore, we will use means in further discussions. 11

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Fig. 2. Mean ratings ± standard error for the factors DIRECTNESS (Assertion vs. GCI vs. PCI) and TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False).

Consistent with our assumption, true assertions and implicatures were rated significantly higher than false ones (LR-

c2 (1) ¼ 54.718, p < 0.001). Furthermore, our results show a main effect for the interaction of TRUTH VALUE and DIRECTNESS (LRc2 (2) ¼ 36.863, p < 0.001), but none for the factor DIRECTNESS (LR-c2 (2) ¼ 5.355, p ¼ 0.07). Therefore, we can conclude that participants perceived a difference between truthful and untruthful assertions, GCIs, and PCIs. However, we cannot reject our null-hypothesis in case of the factor DIRECTNESS and, therefore, we cannot conclude that participants judged assertions, GCIs and PCIs differently. All further results can be seen in Table 2: Table 2 Results from the mixed-effect linear regression for Experiment I.

Truth value ¼ True Directness ¼ GCI directness ¼ PCI Truth value ¼ True: directness ¼ GCI Truth value ¼ True: directness ¼ GCI

Estimate

Std. error

z value

p value

11.5896 4.2795 4.9429 5.7061 7.6379

1.2095 0.9078 0.9432 1.3276 1.3468

9.582 4.714 5.241 4.298 5.671

<0.001 <0.001 <0.001 <0.001 <0.001

As the results could have been produced by the effect of the assertion condition and as the results do not show whether the difference between GCIs and PCIs is significant, we further conducted a post hoc ordinal regression analysis for the factors TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False) and IMPLICATURE (GCIs vs. PCIs). The results of the post hoc ordinal regression differ from the results above. We found a main effect for the factor TRUTH VALUE (LR-c2 (1) ¼ 43.568, p < .001), but not for the factor IMPLICATURE (LRc2 (1) ¼ 0.142, p ¼ .7), nor for the interaction of both factors (LR-c2 (1) ¼ 4.392, p ¼ .036). Since our data show that both untruthful implicature types are assessed significantly more as lies compared to true ones, we can conclude that implicatures can be interpreted as lies. However, the non-significant interaction of both factors shows that true and untruthful PCIs are not assessed differently from true and untruthful GCIs, nor that PCIs and GCIs are overall assessed differently. Table 3 summarizes the further results from the post-hoc mixed-effects ordinal regression analysis. Table 3 Results from the post-hoc mixed-effect linear regression for Experiment I.

Truth Value ¼ True Directness ¼ PCI Truth Value ¼ True: Directness ¼ PCI

Estimate

Std. error

z value

p value

6.0883 0.6788 1.9870

0.7244 0.5840 0.9430

8.405 1.162 2.107

<0.001 0.2451 0.0351

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As can be seen in Table 4, GCIs and PCIs significantly differ from assertions in untruthful usage but do not differ from each other. When true content is concerned, PCIs (but not GCIs) differ from assertions, while PCIs and GCIs again do not differ significantly from each other. The overall similarity between the two kinds of implicature thus seems robust.

Table 4 Results from the post-hoc mixed-effect ordinal regressions for all factor combinations from Experiment I.

Untruthful

Assertions vs. Assertions vs. GCIs vs. PCIs Assertions vs. Assertions vs. GCIs vs. PCIs

Truthful

PCIs GCIs PCIs GCIs

Estimate

Std. error

z value

p value

5.1778 4.422 0.6597 2.5206 1.2345 1.2489

0.9215 1.173 0.5925 0.8015 0.9457 0.7022

5.619 3.769 1.113 3.145 1.305 1.779

<0.001 <0.001 0.266 0.002 0.192 0.0753

3.2. Experiment II The results of the second experiment are similar to those of the first experiment. For both age groups, true and untruthful assertions show the highest (Five-to-six-year-olds: 4.70 ± 0.89; Eight-to-nine-year-olds: 4.87 ± 0.61) and lowest (Five-to-sixyear-olds: 1.43 ± 1.12; Eight-to-nine-year-olds: 1.17 ± 0.69) values close to the extreme points of the scale, meaning that, again, we can conclude sufficient proficiency with the control items and the rating system to proceed with further analyses. In accordance with the first experiment, the values for the PCIs show the smallest difference between the levels of TRUTH VALUE (true PCIs for the younger children: 4.67 ± 0.87; true PCIs for the older children: 4.79 ± 0.54; untruthful PCIs for the younger children: 3.20 ± 1.78; untruthful PCIs for the older children: 2.66 ± 1.28). The descriptive characteristics are summarized in Table 5 and are displayed graphically in Fig. 3. Table 5 Mean ratings ± standard deviation and medians for the factors DIRECTNESS (Assertion vs. PCI) and TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False) by DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE (Fiveto-six-year-olds vs. Eight-to-nine-year-olds). Five-to-six-year-olds False

Assertion PCI

Eight-to-nine-year-olds True

False

True

Mean ± SD

Median

Mean ± SD

Median

Mean ± SD

Median

Mean ± SD

Median

1.43 ± 1.12 3.20 ± 1.78

1 4

4.70 ± 0.89 4.67 ± 0.87

5 5

1.17 ± 0.69 2.66 ± 1.28

1 3

4.87 ± 0.61 4.79 ± 0.54

5 5

Fig. 3. Mean ratings ± standard error for the factors DIRECTNESS (Assertion vs. PCI) and TRUTH VALUE (True vs. False) by DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE (Five-to-six-yearolds vs. Eight-to-nine-year-olds vs. Adults).

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Although the values for the factor combinations of TRUTH VALUE and DIRECTNESS differ between the developmental stages, the differences are small and the post hoc ordinal regression analysis did not reveal any significant differences. The results from the post-hoc ordinal regressions for all factor combinations can be seen in Table 6. Table 6 Results from the post-hoc mixed-effect ordinal regressions for all factor combinations from Experiment II.

Truthful assertions

Untruthful assertions

Truthful PCIs

Untruthful PCIs

5-6-year-olds 5-6-year-olds 8-9-year-olds 5-6-year-olds 5-6-year-olds 8-9-year-olds 5-6-year-olds 5-6-year-olds 8-9-year-olds 5-6-year-olds 5-6-year-olds 8-9-year-olds

vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs. vs.

8-9-year-olds adults adults 8-9-year-olds adults adults 8-9-year-olds adults adults 8-9-year-olds adults adults

Estimate

Std. error

z value

p value

1.2003 1.3768 0.2641 1.8750 2.6352 1.081 0.3153 0.6152 1.1239 0.6726 0.9560 0.1327

0.7904 0.6514 0.9523 0.8363 0.9758 1.092 0.5135 0.4330 0.5979 0.5234 0.7603 0.5636

1.519 2.114 0.277 2.242 2.701 0.99 0.614 1.421 1.88 1.285 1.258 0.235

0.129 0.034 0.782 0.025 0.007 0.322 0.539 0.155 0.06 0.199 0.209 0.814

In line with the first experiment, the mixed-effect ordinal regression showed a main effect for the factors TRUTH VALUE (LR-

c2 (1) ¼ 28.501, p < 0.001) and the interaction of TRUTH VALUE and DIRECTNESS (LR-c2 (1) ¼ 38.124, p < 0.001). However, in contrast with the first experiment, there was a significant main effect for DIRECTNESS (LR-c2 (1) ¼ 6.468, p ¼ 0.01), while the factor DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE (LR-c2 (2) ¼ 4.789, p ¼ 0.09) and the interaction between the factors DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE and TRUTH VALUE (LR-c2 (2) ¼ 4.6, p ¼ 0.1) yielded no significant differences. In addition, we could neither find significant differences for the interactions between the factors DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE and DIRECTNESS (LR-c2 (2) ¼ 2.269, p ¼ 0.32), nor for the interaction of all three factors (LR-c2 (2) ¼ 5.051, p ¼ 0.08). We can, hence, conclude that the three age groups did not rate the items differently and assessed true and false items homogeneously. Moreover, our results do not show any significant disparities for the three age groups with respect to the rating of assertions and PCIs or regarding truthful and untruthful assertions and PCIs. Thus, we have to discard our hypothesis that the judgment of truthful and untruthful PCIs depends on the developmental stage. All further results can be seen in Table 7: Table 7 Results from the mixed effect linear regression for Experiment II.

Truth value ¼ True Directness ¼ PCI DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 8-9-year-olds DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 5-6-year-olds Truth value ¼ True: directness ¼ PCI Truth value ¼ True: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 8-9-year-olds Truth value ¼ True: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 5-6-year-olds Directness ¼ PCI: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 8-9-year-olds Directness ¼ PCI: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 5-6-year-olds Truth value ¼ True: directness ¼ PCI: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 8-9-year-olds Truth value ¼ True: directness ¼ PCI: DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE ¼ 5-6-year-olds

Estimate

Std. Error

z Value

p value

11.4450 5.4942 0.2934 1.8942 8.0419 0.6100 3.1966 0.1551 0.9713 1.3429 2.9603

1.0840 0.8425 0.8496 0.8407 1.1149 1.2342 1.2290 0.9228 0.9688 1.2173 1.3017

10.558 6.522 0.345 2.253 7.213 0.494 2.601 0.168 1.003 1.103 2.274

<0.001 <0.001 0.72298 0.0243 <0.001 .6211 0.0093 0.8665 0.3161 0.2699 0.023

4. General discussion Our first hypothesis regarded a long-standing debate within the literature: are implicated contributions to utterance meaning suited for untruthful usage and, by extension, are they found to constitute lies proper; as such, is Meibauer's (2014) Extended Definition that essentially classifies lying as a practice at the interface of semantics and pragmatics valid? Or are Saul (2012) and Horn (2017a,b) correct in assuming lies to be a purely semantic phenomenon? Both positions regarding lying seem to make partly correct predictions for our data, though neither fits the obtained results completely. On the one hand, our data show a statistically significant difference between false implicatures and false assertions, where false implicatures are judged as less severe lies, thus indicating that untruthful implicatures in some way differ from prototypical ones. In this sense, the distinct ratings appear to be more in line with those who posit lying to be essentially semantic in nature with implicatures constituting a separate category like deception (Dynel, 2015; Saul, 2012; Horn, 2017a,b). On the other hand, Saul's prediction that implicit lies are not to be understood as lies proper is not borne out, because the judgments were clearly situated in the lower half of scale, which was reserved for lies. If lying were a purely semantic phenomenon as proposed by Saul (2012), participants should not have judged untruthful implicated responses as (not even less severe) lies. However, Willemsen/Wiegmann's proposed transferal of the Untruthfulness Condition (Mahon,

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2015) to the realm of pragmatics ostensibly runs counter to the cascading judgments found in the present investigation, especially when PCIs and assertions are contrasted. In other words, while pragmatic components of utterance meaning do play a role, our results seem to indicate that speakers distinguish between different degrees of implicitness. Furthermore, as no category for deception (contrasted with lie) was provided in our experiment, we cannot exclude that participants chose to rate such items as ‘weaker’ instances of lying. In consequence, this issue warrants further investigation and a study is currently in progress. However, there might be another reason for the difference between untruthful assertion and GCIs/PCIs that calls into question the conclusion that implicitness affects the degree to which speakers categorize lying: in our experiments, the implicatures consistently arose from truthful assertions. As such, in the implicature condition, there was always a duality of truth values in that the asserted content was true, while the implicature was false d taking this into consideration, the rating discrepancies are expected, but crucially do not necessarily follow from a categorial divergence, but rather from a circumstantial one. It seems reasonable to argue that this configuration may explain the pattern observed more succinctly than a posited difference between delivery methods. If this explanation is on the right track, it would contradict approaches positing lies to be a semantic category, but favor, in line with Willemsen/Wiegmanns's as well as Meibauer's conclusion, a pragmatic construal of lying. On this account, any difference can be explained via heterogeneous truth values without reliance on theoretical differences as causal for the obtained results. Regarding our second hypothesis, namely the distinction between GCIs and PCIs, this difference does not feature significantly in either truthful or untruthful usages, meaning their suitability for lying does not vary according to our statistical analyses. As a side note, we found that GCIs resulting from scalar terms and those that do not are judged in a similar fashion, though this lacks statistical power.12 To that end, a neo-Gricean account faces challenges, at least when a close association with lexical meaning, as with GCIs, is contrasted with contextually triggered utterance meaning, as is the case with PCIs. Of course, this conclusion relies on the assumption that underlying dissimilarities extend towards suitability for deceptive uses and, while this seems natural to hypothesize, other factors could be invoked to explain the consonance in the context of this investigation. A different picture presented itself with the truthful items: here, while PCIs and GCIs do not differ from each other, GCIs and assertions also do not feature a statistically significant difference, which, in contrast to untruthful conditions, is indeed expected under a neo-Gricean pragmatics. Within the adult age bracket, truthful PCIs were judged less extreme relative to the endpoints of the scale compared to assertive truth; i.e., they were significantly less well suited for conveying truthful content. An explanation for this result might involve pragmatic adequacy: an indirect, or rather implicated, response seems to have been judged an inappropriate choice within our contexts. In contrast, no such variation between true PCIs and true assertions was found for the younger participant groups, which seemingly lends support to the tolerance hypothesis endorsed by Panizza et al. (submitted), according to which, while being capable of computing inferred and asserted meaning alike, children are inclined to ignore pragmatic infelicity and to instead pursue literal meaning unless specific contextual conditions arise. We will return to this point below in the context of experiment 2. However, with the adults, no significant difference between true assertions and truthful GCIs emerged d an outcome that, combined with our finding that true PCIs and assertions do, in fact, differ, advocates for a neo-Gricean view of utterance meaning: due to their close association with lexical content and diminished dependence upon the context, a different relation to assertions between GCIs and PCIs is expected within a (neo-)Gricean approach. Thus, neo-Griceans can better capture the result in the non-deceptive condition, whereas frameworks that understand implicated meaning to arise from general principles and that, by extension, propose no subdivision among implicatures like a traditional Gricean understanding of pragmatics or Relevance Theory can better account for the uniform behavior detected in the present study in untruthful cases. While the latter appears to give credence to a non-Gricean understanding of inferred meanings for our primary target of investigation, consider our attempt at keeping both motive and situational relevance constant across items d a consideration, by the way, that operates less potently in the truthful uses discussed above. This last point may have served to level the discrepancies between the two varieties of implicature. Of course, the present study does not provide a sufficient basis for rejecting either theoretical position, since all accounts are met with challenges. In sum, the fact that discriminatory ratings were only statistically apparent between untruthful assertions and untruthful implicatures, but not between GCIs and PCIs, suggests that, while assertions are the paradigm case for lying, implicatures behave largely uniformly in deceptive contexts. We could not replicate Weissman and Terkourafi's (2018) outcome that only a very restricted subset of GCIs and no PCIs at all were suited for deceptive uses and would argue that this is a direct

12 Although it is not statistically relevant due to our experimental design and too few items per factor level, we moreover analyzed the difference between scalar and non-scalar GCIs with a mixed-effect ordinal regression with a Laplace approximation, by-subject random intercepts and slopes, as well as byitem random intercepts with the factors GCI-Type (scalar vs. non-scalar) and Truth Value (true vs. false). The mean ratings of scalar implicatures (false: 1. 8 ± 1.16; true: 4.8 ± 0.54) were lower than the mean ratings of non-scalar implicatures (false: 2.63 ± 1.52; true: 4.91 ± 0.39). Therefore, participants judged untruthful scalar implicatures more harshly than non-scalar implicatures. Our analysis yielded a main effect for the factor Truth Value (p < 0.001). However, we could not find a main effect for the factor GCI-Type (p ¼ 0.022), nor for the interaction of both factors (p ¼ 0.393). Furthermore, the post hoc ordinal regression showed that, both the differences between the true scalar and non-scalar implicatures (p ¼ 0.127), and the differences between the untruthful scalar and non-scalar implicatures (p ¼ 0.0903) were not significant. As discussed above, one of our items contained a numeral which behaved in unison with the scalar GCI items, that is, it was rated differently from assertions. In the context of the emergent discussion about numerals as non-scalar terms, this is a surprising result.

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consequence of both the increased number of items per condition (in their experiment, each kind of implicature was only featured once) and the more precise QUD. Lastly, the visual support in our experimental setting might have also rendered the lies more prominent. After comparing the age groups, our final hypothesis, namely the proposed difference induced by developmental factors, needs to be rejected due to an overall similar performance across all participants. The most striking insight is the pragmatic competence of children, no matter whether younger or older, provided the context cancels tolerant behavior towards inferential meaning d in our case, the high contextual relevance of the implicature (which targets the QUD) and the perceived assessment of morality.13 This statement is clearly illustrated by one five-year-old participant's exclamation of “that's true, but she also put it in her pocket” regarding the bouncy ball item, see (6), before choosing the smiley associated with a rating of 3. Here, the respective choice is, again, informed by the duality of meaning between (consistently truthful) assertive meaning and untruthful implicature both of which are present simultaneously. It seems, then, that deceptive language not only does not add to the complexity of the task in such a way as to inhibit meaning computation, but implicated lies, on account of their high relevance, might also prove to be a setting which brings to the fore children's inferential abilities. In the realm of competence, within our study, children perform just as well as adults (thus running counter to Noveck, 2001). Again, in our view, these results are due to item preparation, particularly the scenic support and the child-oriented, and thus familiar, subject matters as well as the confrontation with transgressive behavior. A last point concerns the pragmatic tolerance hypothesis according to which younger speakers are more forgiving of pragmatic infelicity. Specifically, in our experiment tolerating pragmatic oddity or simply ignoring the inferential utterance content was not feasible: for the indirect items, only the implicated meaning was at-issue while the assertion in isolation is devoid of cooperative contribution to the conversational goal. In effect, disregarding inferences necessarily leads to viewing the conversation as fruitless, which in turn decreases the likelihood of participants' indifference towards inferences. This contrasts with other experimental designs (e.g. Noveck, 2001) where the computation of the implicature is responsible for the oddity effect and can be ignored without yielding an incoherent dialogue; so the opposite case from the present study. A further remark is in order concerning extrapragmatic factors that come into play: in one item (see Mendeley Data, https://doi.org/10.17632/xgbjr735m7.1, test item 2.8), recognition of the lie rested on establishing a link between tomatoes and vegetables and hence world knowledge. As this connection might not have been made consistently, the divergent rating for this item is likely not caused by any lack of pragmatic competence. In opposition to adult test subjects, there was no discernible difference between truthful PCIs and assertions e this, however, maybe speaks to the younger age groups’ (remaining) tolerance regarding pragmatic adequacy as discussed above. In summary, the customary claim within language acquisition literature that the Theory of Mind and, along with it, pragmatic abilities emerge at around 7 years is challenged by our data: not only were 5-year-old children able to derive inferred meanings and evaluate them on a scale, there also was no statistically significant difference between any of the three age groups. In effect, even the youngest children possess equivalent pragmatic competence to the adults, barring limitations from extra-pragmatic sources such as world knowledge. In agreement with Panizza et al. (submitted) and Shetreet et al. (2014) then, we conclude that inferred propositional content is accessible earlier than originally thought, even though, due to pragmatic tolerance in younger years (Katsos and Bishop, 2011), behavioral feedback might be restricted circumstantially. We leave the exploration of the actual age of acquisition to future research. 5. Conclusion In this paper, we provided experimental data for both adults' and children's perception of untruthful implicatures. In our first study, we showed that adults rate false implicatures to be applicable as lies. Furthermore, there was no distinction between PCIs and GCIs in truthful or untruthful usage cases. In our second experiment, we showed that, even with younger children, untruthful PCIs are eligible for lying. Interestingly, these judgments do not seem to depend on the developmental stage of the children (as argued elsewhere) as all age groups displayed similar behavior. Instead, we propose that previous studies which claim that children rely on literal meaning (and are thereby more ‘logical’) e as opposed to employing enrichments of various types e neglected to take into account their pragmatic tolerance. We circumvented this latter property by providing highly relevant contexts (at-issue implicatures paired with non-at-issue assertions and moral transgressions) that aligned with children's dispositions. References Ambridge, Ben, 2010. Children's judgments of regular and irregular novel past-tense form: new data on the English past-tense debate. Dev. Psychol. 46 (6), 1497e1504. phanie, 2007. Nonliteral language forms in children: in what order are they acquired in pragmatics and Bernicot, Josie, Laval, Virginie, Chaminaud, Ste metapragmatics? J. Pragmat. 39 (12), 2115e2132. Carston, Robyn, 2004. Relevance theory and the saying/implicating distinction. In: Horn, Laurence R., Ward, Gregory (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 633e656.

13 Note that, while moral judgments might have affected the rating behavior, this does not bear any relevance on the conclusions drawn here. In order to arrive at a moral evaluation, the implicated proposition has to be derived; as such the results clearly show children's competence.

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In: Parret, Herman, Sbis a, Marina, Verschueren, Jef (Eds.), Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics: Proceedings of the Conference on Pragmatics, Urbino, July 8e14, 1979. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 749e777. von Stutterheim, Christiane, Klein, Wolfgang, 1989. Referential movement in descriptive and narrative discourse. In: Dietrich, Rainer, Graumann, Carl (Eds.), Language Processing in Social Context. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 39e76. Weissman, Benjamin, Terkourafi, Marina, 2018. Are false implicatures lies? An experimental investigation. Mind Lang. 1e26. Wiegmann, Alex, Rutschmann, Ronja, Willemsen, Pascale, 2017. Empirically investigating the concept of lying. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 34 (3), 591e609. Willemsen, Pascale, Wiegmann, Alex, 2017. How the truth can make a great lie: an empirical investigation of the folk concept of lying by falsely implicating. In: Gunzelmann, Glenn, et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society, Austin, pp. 3516e3621. Wilson, Deirdre, Sperber, Dan, 2004. Relevance theory. In: Horn, Laurence R., Ward, Gregory (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 607e632. Dr. Mailin Antomo: From 2002 to 2008, Mailin Antomo studied German and French philology at the University of Mainz and at the University of Dijon. Afterwards, she was a PhD student at the graduate program “Sentence types: variation and interpretation” funded by the German national research foundation (DFG) at the University of Frankfurt a. M. Since 2009, she has been a (post)doctoral researcher for Linguistics at the Department of German €ttingen. In 2013, she defended her dissertation on “Embedded clauses in a question-based discourse model”. Her research interests focus on Philology in Go the semanticsepragmatics interface and text and discourse structure.

Main publications:  [with Sonja Müller] Non-canonical verb positioning in main clauses: Phenomena and research questions. To appear in: Müller, Sonja/Antomo, Mailin (eds.): Non-canonical verb positioning in main clauses. Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 25 (2018).  Marking (not-)at-issue content by using verb order variation in German. In: Reich, Ingo/Speyer, Augustin (eds.): Co- and subordination in German and other languages. (Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 21 (2016)), 21e54.

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 Projective Meaning and the Licensing of Embedded Root Phenomena. In: Boone, Enrico/Linke, Kathrin/Schulpen, Maartje (Hg.): Proceedings of ConSOLE XIX (2012) Leiden, 1e23.  Interpreting Embedded Verb Second. In: Constantinescu, Camelia/Le Bruyn, Bert/Linke, Kathrin (Hg.): Proceedings of ConSOLE XVII (2012), 27e51. €tze an der Schnittstelle zwischen Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik.  [with Markus Steinbach] Desintegration und Interpretation. Weil-V2-Sa In: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 29.1 (2010), 1e37.

€ ttingen. Currently, she is working on her bachelor's thesis. Susanne Müller: Susanne Müller is studying German and English philology at the University of Go Since 2015, she has worked as a student assistent in several positions at the Department of German Philology, ranging from the sections of Literature, Linguistics, and Medieval Studies to German Language Teaching. € ttingen and the University of Katharina Paul: Since 2014, Katharina Paul is studying German philology and history at the Georg-August-University Go Vienna. In 2016, she started working as a student assistant at the linguistics division of the German Department, among others for the journal “Linguistische Berichte” and the Sign Language Team. Her main interests are sign language linguistics, pragmatics and historical linguistics. €ttingen from 2009 to 2014. Afterwards, he studied German and Slavic philology for Markus Paluch: Markus Paluch studied biology at the University of Go two semesters and, in 2015, began his Master of Arts in linguistics. Since then, he worked as a student assistant in the psycholinguistic laboratory and in the € ttingen. From 2015 to 2016, he additionally worked as a KOLIMO (Korpus der literarischen Moderne) project at the Department of German Philology in Go €ttingen. His research interests focus on psycholinguistics and digital student assistant in the Sign Lab and, since 2016, he teaches statistics as a tutor in Go corpus linguistics. Maik Thalmann: After having completed his undergraduate degree majoring in English and German philology in 2017, Maik Thalmann is currently enrolled € ttingen. There, he works as a student assistant in both research and teaching functions. as a Master's student in the linguistics program at the University of Go His main interests include the syntaxesemantics interface as well as psycholinguistics.