Marta Dynel

In this article, we examine dark humour in Internet posts commenting on an online Italian newspaper report published by Il Fatto Quotidiano and devoted to the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice. The analysis focuses on the linguistic forms and socio-pragmatic functions of this dark humour in the wake of the tragedy. We argue that the creative humorous posts are meant to communicate Internet users’ ideologies conceptualised as their true beliefs about the sociopolitical situation and that they are oriented primarily towards criticising terrorism-related themes, notably: inept security enforcement, radical Islam, political and public reactions and integration policies. The humour in the Italian posts is used as a means of displaying Internet users’ wit and attracting other users’ attention.

This article gives a comprehensive theoretical account of deception in multimodal film narrative in the light of the pragmatics of film discourse, the cognitive philosophy of film, multimodal analysis, studies of fictional narrative and – last but not least – the philosophy of lying and deception. Critically addressing the extant literature, a range or pertinent notions and issues are examined: multimodality, film narration and the status of the cinematic narrator, the pragmatics of film construction, the fictional world and its truth, the recipient’s film engagement and make believing, as well as narrative unreliability. Previous accounts of deceptive films are revisited and three main types of film deception are proposed with regard to the two levels of communication on which it materialises, the characters’ level and the recipient’s level, as well as the intradiegetic and/or the extradiegetic narrator involved. This discussion is illustrated with multimodally transcribed examples of deception extracted from the American television series House. In the course of the analysis, attention is paid to how specific types of deception detailed in the philosophy of language are deployed through multimodal means in the three types of film deception. Finally, inspired by the discussion of Hitchcock’s controversial lying flashback scene in Stage Fright, as well as films relying on tacit intradiegetic, unreliable narrators an attempt is made to answer the thorny question of when the extradiegetic narrator can perform lies addressed by the collective sender to the recipient, and not just only other forms of deception, as is commonly maintained.

This paper aims to distil the essence of deception performed by means of withholding information, a topic hitherto largely neglected in the psychological, linguistic, and philosophical research on deception. First, the key conditions for deceptively withholding information are specified. Second, several notions related to deceptively withholding information are critically addressed with a view to teasing out the main forms of withholding information. Third, it is argued that deceptively withholding information can be conceptualized in pragmatic-philosophical terms as being based on the violation of Grice's first maxim of Quantity, which is conducive to covertly untruthful meaning, specifically hearer-inferred what is said that presents the violation of the first maxim of Quality. In order to meet this goal, Gricean and neo-Gricean scholarship on the first maxim of Quantity and its consequences is revisited. Fourth, a number of linguistic realizations of withholding information are examined. It is argued that some of the examples found in the relevant scholarship, namely those that involve scalar expressions, qualify rather as lies.

This book offers fresh perspectives on untruthfulness entailed in various forms of irony, deception and humour, which have so far constituted independent foci of linguistic and philosophical investigation. These three distinct notions are brought together within a neo-Gricean framework and consistently discussed as representing overt or covert untruthfulness. The postulates that represent the interface between language philosophy and pragmatics are illustrated with scripted interactions culled from the series House, which help appreciate the complexities of the three concepts at hand. Apart from affording new insights into the nature of irony, deception and humour, this book critically examines previous literature on these notions, as well as relevant aspects of Grice's philosophy of language. Giving a state-of-theart picture of untruthfulness, this publication will be of interest to both experienced and inexperienced researchers studying Grice?s philosophy, irony, deception and/or humour.

This philosophical-pragmatic paper discusses several forms of irony which rest on other figures of speech contingent on overt untruthfulness, namely the figures arising as a result of flouting the first maxim of Quality. It is argued that an ironic implicature may be piggybacked on another implicature, called “as if implicature”, originating from flouting the first maxim of Quality occasioned by metaphor. Metaphorical irony, which is subject to the irony-after-metaphor order of interpretation, exhibits a number of manifestations depending on the nature and scope of irony, and the scope of the subordinate metaphor. On the other hand, rather than giving rise to an as if implicature distinct from the irony-based one, hyperbole and meiosis, which are inherently evaluative, most typically overlap with ironically evaluative expressions, promoting meiotic and hyperbolic irony, frequently considered by researchers to rely on flouting Quantity maxims. However, cases of independent use of hyperbole or meiosis in ironic environment are also possible. Such invite two levels of untruthfulness and two implicatures.

There Is Method in the Humorous Speaker's Madness: Humour and Grice's Model The interdependence between humour and the Cooperative Principle appears to be a bone of contention in pragmatic studies on verbal humour. The wellentrenched approach advocated by Raskin and Attardo is that jokes constitute the non-bona-fide mode of communication standing vis-à-vis the Gricean model and governed by a humour-CP, and that they violate, not merely flout, the maxims and even the CP. The aim of the article is to shed new light on the interdependence between humour and the CP with a view to substantiating that the authors who regard humour as an independent communicative mode and as an intrinsic violation of maxims and the CP appear to labour under a serious misapprehension. It will be argued that the Gricean model of cooperative rationality does allow for humorous verbalisations, which normally rely on maxim flouts.

No Aggression, Only Teasing: The Pragmatics of Teasing and Banter A bone of contention among researchers is whether the primary function of humour is the expression of aggression against the hearer or the promotion of solidarity between the interlocutors. It is commonly averred that teasing boasts a dichotomous nature, i.e. malignant and benevolent. The former coincides with the potential for criticising, mocking and ostracising the interlocutor, whereas the latter accounts for playfulness and bonding capacity.The overriding goal of the paper is to expound the rapport-building function, which is here postulated to be inherent to teasing. First and foremost, I will determine the scope of interest differentiating between putdown humour and teases, which may assume the form of retorts and develop into multi-turn teases, i.e. banter. Subtypes of teasing will be discussed with a view to proving that it is inherently devoid of genuine aggressiveness. The underlying premise is that teases, even if ostensibly aggressive, i.e. face-threatening, are geared towards solidarity, in conformity with the framework of politeness, including mock impoliteness, holding between intimates. Also, teases fulfil a few subordinate functions such as defunctionalisation or mitigation of face-threatening messages they may carry.

This article addresses the issue of non-verbal communication in the light of the Gricean conceptualisation of intentionally conveyed meanings. The first goal is to testify that non-verbal cues can be interpreted as nonnatural meanings and speaker meanings, which partake in intentional communication. Secondly, it is argued that non-verbal signals, exemplified by gestures, are similar to utterances which generate the communicator's what is said and/or conversational implicatures, together with their different subtypes and manifestations. Both of these objectives necessitate a critical overview of Grice's work on the focal aspects of meaning and communication, also on the strength of neo-Gricean research

On "Revolutionary Road": A Proposal for Extending the Gricean Model of Communication to Cover Multiple Hearers The paper addresses the problem of multiple hearers in the context of the Gricean model of communication, which is based on speaker meaning and the Cooperative Principle, together with its subordinate maxims, legitimately flouted to yield implicatures. Grice appears to have conceived of the communicative process as taking place between two interlocutors, assuming that the speaker communicates meanings, while the hearer makes compatible inferences. A thesis propounded here is that this dyadic account must undergo a number of fundamental modifications to cover a variety of hearer types, both ratified and unratified, partaking in polylogic interactions.

This paper aims to differentiate between lying and irony, typically addressed independently by philosophers and linguists, as well as to discuss the cases when deception co-occurs with, and capitalises on, irony or metaphor. It is argued that the focal distinction can be made with reference to Grice’s first maxim of Quality, whose floutings lead to overt untruthfulness, and whose violations result in covert untruthfulness. Both types of untruthfulness are divided into explicit and implicit subtypes depending on the level of meaning on which they are manifest. Further, it is shown that deception may be based on irony or metaphor, which either promote deceptive implicatures or are deployed covertly. Finally, some argumentation is provided in favour of why these cases of deceiving can be conceptualised as lying.

This introductory paper aims to demystify the concept of untruthfulness. Drawing on the scholarship on deception, the author reports on a distinction between the (objective) truth and (subjective) truthfulness, as well as their respective opposites: falsehood and untruthfulness. An attempt is made to discriminate between truthfulness and sincerity, to notions which capture similar phenomena but have originated in distinct scholarly traditions. Further, the author depicts untruthfulness as an internally diversified construct and teases out its main subtypes. Some light is shed on overt untruthfulness and covert untruthfulness, as approached in philosophical, cognitive and pragmatic literature. The paper closes with a description of the scope of the present Special Issue entitled “New theoretical insights into untruthfulness”.