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Although lying is a classical topic in philosophy, and certainly is very important in everyday life, there is a lack of genuine linguistic analyses of lying. In this article, lying is viewed as a speech act of insincere assertion. The liar misrepresents truth in order to deceive. While definitions like this are fairly common, consequences for the semantics/pragmatics interface, and, more importantly, for the ongoing debate about minimalism versus contextualism, never have been worked out in detail. This is what the article aims at, concentrating on three relevant issues, namely intentionality, implicature, and imprecision. It takes a moderate contextualist stand by showing that the possibility of lying is built into the language, thus allowing speakers to manipulate the representation of truth according to certain social goals. A case in point would be lying while saying the truth; in this case, the risk of being caught in the act of lying is reduced.

For several reasons, phrasal compounds like I-told-you-so attitude are a typical case of a marginal type of word-formation: (i) integration of a phrase into the word should not be allowed (violation of the No Phrase Constraint), (ii) lexical integrity is weakened (violation of the Principle of Lexical Integrity), (iii) they display an expressive flavour typical of marginal morphology. Using the mixed model of Ackema and Neeleman (2004) that allows for insertion from phrasal syntax into word syntax (Generalized Insertion) it is shown that phrasal compounds are by no means marginal from a purely theoretical point of view. However, the expressivity of marginal compounds has to be explained. Drawing on experimental data, it is shown that ad hoc phrasal compounds are understandable and witty to a high degree. These results are explained within the Presumptive Meanings approach of Levinson (2000) that develops the notion of Generalized Conversational Implicature (GCI). It is shown that the expressivity of ad hoc phrasal compounds stems from a word-level conflict between observing the I-principle (that favours the enrichment of underdetermined structures) on the one hand, and the Q-principle (that requires maximal information) on the other.

This review deals with the communicative act of lying from a linguistic point of view, linguistics comprising both grammar and pragmatics. Integrating findings from the philosophy of language and from psychology, I show that the potential for lying is rooted in the language system. The tasks of providing an adequate definition of lying and of distinguishing lying from other concepts of deception (such as bald-faced lying and bullshitting) can be solved when interfaces between grammar and pragmatics are taken into account and when experimental results are used to narrow down theoretical approaches. Assuming a broadly neo-Gricean background, this review focuses on four theoretical topics: the role of the truth in lying, the scalarity and imprecision of lying, the speaker's intent to deceive, and the possibility of producing deceptive implicatures. I also briefly discuss questions of lying and neuroscience, the acquisition of lying, and prosocial and cross-cultural contexts of lying.