Lying, deceiving, misleading: are we committed to our gestures?

• Applicant: Dr. Mailin Antomo
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 502020235

Human communication is much about making and understanding commitments and, consequently, the concept of commitment has been studied by various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and linguistics. The latter can also be said about lies and deceptions, where a proper definition of lying, according to many researchers, has to relate to commitment. Both concepts, commitment and lies, have been investigated with a strong focus on spoken and written language, whereas visual aspects of communication have often been marginalized. This research project pursues the main objective to enhance the theory of commitment and the concept of lying in order that they are able to capture gestural meaning contributions by conducting experimental studies. Our two major issues are, thus, empirical (gather new data on (deceptive) gestures and commitment) and theoretical (implementation of gestural meaning contributions into theoretical notions of commitment and lying). Thus, the project contributes directly to the overarching objective of the Priority Programme ViCom by investigating the significance of the verbal – visual distinction in commitment attribution and the theory of lying.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2392: Visual communication. Theoretical, empirical, and applied perspectives (ViCom)