Project Participants
Dr. Mailin Ines Antomo
(Principal Investigator)
University of Göttingen
mailin.antomo@phil.uni-goettingen.de
Mailin Antomo’s research investigates phenomena at the interface of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics with a focus on German. She has worked, both theoretically and empirically, on embedded root phenomena, (not-)at-issueness, implicatures, presuppositions, lying and deceiving, and the acquisition of these phenomena. Furthermore, she is interested in educational linguistics. She obtained her PhD from the University of Göttingen in 2015, after being part of the DFG-funded research training group “Sentence types: Variation and Interpretation” at the university of Frankfurt. She is currently a permanent lecturer for German linguistics at the University of Göttingen and principal investigator of the project “Lying, deceiving, misleading: are we committed to our gestures?”.
Selected publications
- Antomo, Mailin (to appear): Lying with visual means. To appear in: Wiegmann, Alex (ed.): Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit. Bloomsbury, Advances in Experimental Philosophy.
- Chen, Yuqiu/Thalmann, Maik/Antomo, Mailin (2022): Presuppositions and at-issueness: Insights from language acquisition into the soft-hard distinction. In: Journal of Pragmatics 199, 21-46.
- Thalmann, Maik/Chen, Yuqiu/Müller, Susanne/Paluch, Markus/Antomo, Mailin (2021): Against PCI-GCI uniformity: Evidence from deceptive language in German and Chinese. In: Linguistische Berichte 267, 355-385.
- Antomo, Mailin/Müller, Susanne/Paluch, Markus/Paul, Katharina/Thalmann, Maik (2018): When children aren’t more logical than adults: An empirical investigation of lying by falsely implicating. In: Journal of Pragmatics 138, 135-148.
- Antomo, Mailin (2012): Projective Meaning and the Licensing of Embedded Root Phenomena. In: Boone, Enrico/Linke, Kathrin/Schulpen, Maartje (ed.): Proceedings of ConSOLE XIX, Leiden, 1-23.
Yuqiu Chen
(Postdoc Researcher)
University of Göttingen
yuqiu.chen@uni-goettingen.de
Yuqiu Chen is mainly interested in phenomena at the semantics-pragmatics interface and has worked, amongst others, on presuppositions, at-issueness, implicatures with a focus on their acquisition and cross-linguistic comparison. Recently, Yuqiu has defended her PhD thesis“Presuppositions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: Experimental Studies on Their Classification, Acquisition and Cross-Linguistic Comparison”. She will join the project “Lying, deceiving, misleading: are we committed to our gestures?” as a post-doc in 2024.
Selected publications
- Yuqiu Chen, Maik Thalmann, Mailin Antomo (2022): “Presupposition triggers and (not-) at-issueness: Insights from language acquisition into the soft-hard distinction” In: Journal of Pragmatics (199), 21-46
- Yuqiu Chen (2022): “Wenn Nicht-Muttersprachler/innen mehr Toleranz zeigen: Eine experimentelle Studie zu Präsuppositionen, At-issueness und DaF”, In: Auteri, Laura et al. (Hrsg.): Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive (Bd. 6). Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik Beihefte, 213-227.
- Maik Thalmann, Yuqiu Chen, Susanne Müller, Markus Paluch, Mailin Antomo (2021): “Against PCI-GCI uniformity. Evidence from deceptive language in German and Chinese.” In: Linguistische Berichte, 235-285.
- Yuqiu Chen (2019): “An experimental study on scalar implicatures: Comparing German native speakers and Chinese learners of German.” In: Proceedings of ConSOLE XXVI, 116–138.
Project Description
Lying and, more generally, deceiving are fundamental human experiences: everyone lies and is lied to every day. In the traditional understanding, lying requires asserting something the speaker believes to be false, whereas other verbal or non-verbal ways of deception (like disclosing part of the truth or pointing in the wrong direction)are often analyzed as mere cases of misleading. The border between lying and misleading, then, matches the semantics-pragmatics boundary and lying is restricted to verbally communicated content. However, the recent decade has faced numerous investigations, many of them experimental, who put forward arguments against such a narrow definition of lying. Researchers from empirical linguistics and empirical philosophy have shown, for instance, that it is possible to lie by means of implicatures or with presuppositions. Furthermore, the results of several studies suggest that there is a strong correlation between the degree of perceived commitment and the degree to which an utterance is perceived as a lie. Following such a commitment-based definition of lying, lying, then, amounts to being committed to a proposition p that is false (or that the communicator of p believes to be false). Both concepts, commitment, and lying have been investigated with a strong focus on spoken and written language, whereas visual aspects of communication have often been marginalized. Therefore, this project aims at investigating the significance of the verbal/visual distinction in commitment attribution and the theory of lying by aiming to answer the following questions:-Are untruthful gestures perceived as lies, or is lying bound to verbal communication? To what degree do gestures involve speaker commitment?-Can a commitment-based notion of lying account for untruthful gestures? It is planned to conduct systematic empirical studies on (deceptive) gestures and commitment by working with visual data captured on video (in German and Chinese) to elicit lay people’s intuitions. A first pilot study shows differences depending on gesture type and contextual relevance of the gestural content. In sum, by conducting experimental studies, 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. The 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).
Project (Related) Publications and Data
Publications
Antomo, M. (2025). Lying with gestures. Wiegmann, A. (ed.): Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit. Bloomsbury: Advances in Experimental Philosophy, 169-194.
Antomo, M., Duddey, E. (to appear). Lüge und Wahrheit. Eine unterrichtspraktische Annäherung an semantische Grundbegriffe mittels täuschender Sprache. Bücking, S., Gese, H., Kellermann, K. (ed.). Semantische Phänomene und Grundlagen lehren und lernen. Buske: Sonderheft Linguistische Berichte.
Antomo, M. & Chen, Y. (to appear). Lying and commitment. The case of pointing gestures. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 29.
Antomo, M., Fricke, L., Grosz, P. & Scheffler, T. (to appear). Lying with at-issue and not-at-issue emojis. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 29.
Chen, Y., Thalmann, M., & Antomo, M. (2022). Presupposition triggers and (not-) at-issueness: Insights from language acquisition into the soft-hard distinction. Journal of Pragmatics, 199, 21-46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.06.014 
.
[Data]
Presentations at conferences and workshops
Antomo, M. & Chen, Y. (2024). The information status of co-speech gestures: evidence from lying and commitment. Oral presentation at XPRAG 2024, Venice.
Antomo, M., Grosz, P., Fricke, L. & Scheffler, T. (2024). Lying and commitment with (not-) at-issue emojis. Oral presentation at Sinn und Bedeutung 29, Sicily.
Antomo, M., Grosz, P., Fricke, L. & Scheffler, T. (2024). Lying with emojis. Oral presentation at Visual Language (VisLang) Conference, Tilburg.
Chen, Y. & Antomo, M. (2024). The information status of co-speech gestures: evidence from lying and commitment. Poster presentation at Sinn und Bedeutung 29, Sicily.
Chen, Y. & Antomo, M. (2024). Referential Pointing Gestures are At-Issue: Evidence from Lying and Commitment.Oral presentation at ViCom Workshop The Linguistic Status of Demonstrations, Königstein.
Chen, Y. & Antomo, M. (2024). Lüge und Wahrheit. Eine unterrichtspraktische Annäherung an semantische Grundbegriffe mittels täuschender Sprache. Oral presentation at the 46th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), Bochum.
Krause, L.-M., Antomo, M., Chen, Y. & Herbort, O. (2025). How under-informativity impacts commitment: Pointing gestures versus speech. Poster presentation at the 10th Conference of the ISGS, Nijmegen
Chen, Y. & Antomo, M. (2025). The information status of co-speech gestures: evidence from lying and commitment. Oral presentation at Sinn und Bedeutung 30, Frankfurt a.M.
Antomo, M. & Chen, Y.(2025) (Not-)At-issueness of iconic co-speech gestures and commitment attribution. Oral presentation at XPrag 2025, Cambridge.
Invited talks and guest lectures
Antomo, M. (06.2025). Gesten verpflichten! Commitment in der visuellen Modalität. Linguistischer Arbeitskreis Bochum.
Chen, Y. & Antomo, M. (01.2024). Lying with visual means: deceptive gestures and emojis. Oral presentation at CLIP-Lectures on Lying, University of Cologne.
Events
| Date | Event | Organization |
| 12.-14.02.2025 | Dimensions of Iconicity in the Visual Modality. ViCom workshop, Göttingen | Mailin Antomo, Yuqiu Chen, Thomas Finkbeiner, Silva Ladewig, Nina-Kristin Meister, Markus Steinbach and Patrick Trettenbrein |
Short-term Collaborations
Marking commitment via recurrent gestures. An experimental investigation of the ring precision grip (2025) – Mailin Antomo, Yuqiu Chen & Vinicius Macuch Silva)
Lying with ambiguity? Under-informativity using pointing gestures versus speech (2024) – Mailin Antomo, Yuqiu Chen, Oliver Herbort & Lisa-Marie Krause
Lying with emojis (2024) – Mailin Antomo, Yuqiu Chen, Patrick Grosz, Lea Fricke & Tatjana Scheffler
Teaching
Antomo, Mailin: Linguistik des Lügens, seminar in the summer semester 2024, University of Göttingen
Supervision of three BA theses on the project topic
Outreach
„Linguistik zum Mitmachen“
Presentation of results of the project to a general public (“Nacht des Wissens”) at the University of Göttingen, 21.06.2025