Linguistische Berichte Heft 272

A realistic concept of lying is one that comprises the levels of semantics and pragmatics, and, within pragmatics, speech act theory and implicature theory. Moreover, it focuses on communicated meaning as understood by an average discourse participant. This paper discusses whether lying is regarded by the folk as not only insincerely asserting a false-believed content but also untruthfully implicating a content. Since this is a matter of dispute, recent experimental results on this question are discussed. It turns out that the speaker’s commitment to a content is what ultimately matters when judgments about deceptive acts are made.

The aim of this paper is to establish a common ground model for multi-layered communication in drama. In particular, we will focus on the concept of irony. We will show that in drama ironic effects can be achieved by presenting lies, fallacies or misunderstandings. Whilst these phenomena are communication failures in the internal communication system, they lead to second-order implicatures in the outer communication system, i. e. the communication system between text and audience. In Rapp & Wolman (2022) an evidence-based common ground model was presented in order to describe communications failures in single-layered communication. To capture the interaction of an inner and an outer communication system we will combine their parts in a specific manner: whereas the discourse commitments are taken from the inner system, all other components (common ground, beliefs, facts) belong to the outer system. Importantly, the outer system also includes second-order implicatures arising from communication failures in the inner system. We will illustrate this model by examining crucial passages of the bourgeois tragedy Kabale und Liebe by Friedrich Schiller.

This paper has two objectives: we provide a detailed description of the DGS corpus, the largest existing collection of German Sign Language (DGS) data, and we show how such a corpus may be and already has been used as a resource for linguistic research in academic settings. In the first part, we describe where and how the Public DGS Corpus can be accessed, the types of elicitation tasks and formats that were used for data collection, and the regional and sociolinguistic background of the participants. Taking into account which phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical information has been annotated thus far, we then make suggestions for a wide range of applications of the corpus in phonetic, morphological, syntactic, information structural, sociolinguistic, and typological studies of DGS. Lastly, we summarize the methodologies and results of selected research projects that are based on the DGS corpus.