I investigate: to what extent do folk ascriptions of lying differ between casual and courtroom contexts? to what extent does motive to lie influence ascriptions of trust, mental states, and lying judgments? to what extent are lying judgments consistent with previous ascriptions of communicated content? Following the Supreme Court’s Bronston judgment, I expect: averaged lying judgments to be similar in casual and courtroom contexts; motive to lie to influence levels of trust, mental states ascriptions, and patterns of lying judgments; retrospective (...) judgments of lying, after being presented with the state of the world, to be inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content she did not communicate. I performed a survey experiment on the Qualtrics platform. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I employed standard Likert scales and forced-choice questions. I found that: average lying judgments are similar in casual and courtroom contexts; motive to lie decreases trust ascription and increases lying judgment; judgments of lying are inconsistent with previous judgments of communicated content: participants hold the protagonist responsible for content they did not communicate. Perjury ascriptions are inconsistent. The Supreme Court’s worries expressed in the Bronston judgment are well founded. This article helps reforming jury instructions in perjury cases. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a “gumball paradigm.” On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with 13 gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs then dropped to the lower chamber and participants evaluated statements, such as “You got some of the gumballs.” Experiment 1 established that some is less natural for reference to small sets and unpartitioned sets compared to intermediate sets. Partitive some of was (...) less natural than simple some when used with the unpartitioned set. In Experiment 2, including exact number descriptions lowered naturalness ratings for some with small sets but not for intermediate size sets and the unpartitioned set. In Experiment 3, the naturalness ratings from Experiment 2 predicted response times. The results are interpreted as evidence for a Constraint-Based account of scalar implicature processing and against both two-stage, Literal-First models and pragmatic Default models. (shrink)

Presuppositions are capable of projecting from under the scope of operators such as negation, but do not obligatorily do so. This creates a potential difficulty for the hearer of presupposition-bearing utterances, especially given the fact that speaker can use presupposition to convey entirely new information. In this paper, I discuss the potential role of context in resolving this tension, and in particular, I argue that the inferences that are drawn about the current discourse purpose may be materially relevant to the (...) interpretation of potential presuppositions. I also consider some of the implications of this for recent experimental work on presupposition and projection. (shrink)

This paper integrates methods associated with language socialization and pragmatics to examine how participants in one middle school dance program use the indefinitely referential language of ‘some people’ as a robust resource for socializing embodied competencies related to dance, linguistic competencies related to the ability to use ‘some people’ in indexically and pragmatically complex ways, cognitive competencies related to error-correction and problem-solving, and social-moral competencies related to responsibility-taking. A key argument is that the referential vagueness inherent in ‘some’ as an (...) indefinite determiner contributes fundamentally to the usefulness of ‘some people’ as a language socialization resource in this community of practice. (shrink)

In polite contexts, people find it difficult to perceive whether they can derive scalar inferences from what others say . Because this uncertainty can lead to costly misunderstandings, it is important to identify the cues people can rely on to solve their interpretative problem. In this article, we consider two such cues: Making a long Pause before the statement, and prefacing the statement with Well. Data from eight experiments show that Pauses are more effective than Wells as cues to scalar (...) inferences in polite contexts—because they appear to give a specific signal to switch expectations in the direction of bad news, whereas Well appears to give a generic signal to make extra processing effort. We consider the applied value of these findings for human–human and human–machine interaction, as well as their implications for the study of reasoning and discourse. (shrink)