Evidentiality As A Deceptive Function: ACross-Linguistic Study In English, French, Turkish,And Japanese

This thesis study examined the linguistic structure of lying, focusing particularlyon the use of evidentiality–a grammatical marker indexing the information source.In particular, this study investigated how the obligatory (evidential) and the optional(non-evidential) categories of grammatical evidentiality in language impactthe production of certain linguistic structures as subtle cues of lying in deceitfulversus truthful retellings. In a fully crossed, counterbalanced design, participants(N = 217) from language groups typologically diverse in evidential marking (i.e.,non-evidential languages of English and French, evidential languages of Turkish andJapanese) provided written accounts of the events from brief stories under two manipulations:presentation modality (i.e., silent video clips or audio recordings) andveracity (i.e., either truthfully or deceitfully). Narratives were coded for the frequenciesof the grammatical and lexical forms covering tenses, negations, and evidentialmarkers, and then, cross-linguistically examined for their distribution across theconditions. The results revealed that lie tellers in evidential languages exploit directevidentials in their statements–not the indirect ones, suggesting a pragmatic useof evidentials as firsthand accounts. The speakers of non-evidential languages usedevidential markers without uniformity in deception conditions, such that perceptionverbs were fewer in English and affirmation adverb rates were higher in French,except both languages adopted a more negative tone in their lies, confirming the previousevidence. Overall, this study identifies an overlooked grammatical category,evidentiality, as a deceptive cue for the first time and provides a comprehensiveapproach to deception detection research cross-linguistically.