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Tomando como punto de partida una definición precisa de un meme de Internet (frente a un constructo memético), este artículo pretende compartir los resultados obtenidos del primer estudio diacrónico sobre memes, centrado específicamente en los memes de mascarillas en el amplio panorama de memes surgido a raíz de la pandemia del COVID-19, asociado a la cambiante situación sociopolítica. El estudio utiliza un corpus diacrónico de memes con mascarillas para el COVID-19 etiquetados por usuarios (publicados en Internet desde enero de 2020 hasta enero de 2021) extraídos de Google mediante un script de Python. Sobre la base de un enfoque de teoría fundamentada, se extraen y examinan diez categorías meméticas (divididas en cuatro grupos) a través de una lente analítica de discurso multimodal. El análisis cuantitativo diacrónico muestra que los constructos meméticos, inspirados por la situación/acontecimientos sociopolíticos actuales y facilitados por el contexto sociopolítico (por ejemplo, el confinamiento), parecen persistir, aunque con intensidad variada, durante la mayor parte del año, lo que permitió que muchos memes se volvieran virales. La longevidad de los memes y los constructos meméticos es indicativa del objetivo principal de los usuarios, que es compartir elementos interesantes y/o humorísticos (no siempre nuevos o relevantes) por diversión, independientemente de la naturaleza de los memes (es decir, humor autotélico por sí mismo o comentarios de los usuarios sobre la realidad circundante), Taking as its point of departure a fine-tuned definition of an Internet meme (vis-à-vis a memetic construct), this paper reports the findings of the first diachronic study of memes, the focus being on mask memes on the vast COVID-19 mask memescape evolving in the wake of the pandemic, relative to the changing socio-political situation. The study capitalises on a diachronic corpus of user-tagged COVID-19 mask memes (posted online from January 2020 to January 2021) collected from Google through a Python script. Based on a grounded-theory approach, ten memetic categories (clustered into four groups) are extracted and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The diachronic quantitative analysis shows that the memetic constructs, inspired by the current socio-political situation/events and facilitated by the socio-political context (e.g. going into lockdown), seem to persist, albeit with varied intensity, for the best part of the year, with many individual memes going viral. Memes’ and memetic constructs’ long lifespan is indicative of users’ primary goal, which is to share interesting and/or humorous (not always newly minted or relevant) items for the sake of fun, regardless of the memes’ nature (i.e. autotelic humour for its own sake or users’ commentaries on the surrounding reality)

This paper reports the findings of a study of two automatically generated corpora of multimodal digital items user-tagged as ‘Black Lives Matter memes’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter memes’. The central ai...

This paper postulates a distinction between two types of discursive aggression in the context of humour production. This theoretical argument is supported by a qualitative (meta)pragmatic analysis of posts on the RoastMe subreddit devoted to an online community's original humorous practice based on jocular insults. The study of emic (community members') and etic (outsiders') metapragmatic evaluations of the content on the subreddit yields divergent insider/outsider interpretations of the practice at hand; it also uncovers some ambivalence in the polysemous folk concepts of roasting and cyberbullying and the relationship between them. “Roasting” and “cyberbullying” are formally distinguished based on the intended form of aggression on which each relies. Also, the points of convergence between humour and aggression are surveyed. First, mock aggression underlies benevolent humour (typified by roasting proper); second, genuine aggression (exemplified by cyberbullying proper) may amuse individuals other than the target of discursive aggression.

This paper addresses theoretical and methodological issues central to the study of insults (realised ad hoc or as rituals) on social media. After revisiting the well-entrenched but problematic distinction between personal insults and ritual insults, a proposal is made to distinguish between genuine insults, which are intended to offend the target (whether or not conveying truthful messages), and jocular insults, which are devoid of this intent and orientated towards collective humour experience. Additionally, the subcategory humorous genuine insult is put forward in order to capture the practice based on wittily formulated but purposefully offensive messages commonplace especially in multi-party interactions, such as those available to multiple receivers on social media. Assigning insults to these categories rests on conjecturing language users' underlying intentions, which is a fraught task, particularly with regard to social media data. In order to accomplish it, the form and content, as well as various micro- and macro-contextual cues, need to be taken into account, as illustrated with a sample of insults taken from James Bunt's Twitter and remediatised Jimmy Kimmel's Mean Tweets. An analysis of the two practices on social media also indicates the epistemic uncertainty of insults, as well as the shifts between different insults occurring in one interactional space.

This paper gives a theoretical introduction to the pragmatic research on the communication of public humour in traditional and new media, notably on social media. It discusses some of the central problems relevant to humour research and media communication. It describes, among other things, how the technological affordances of traditional and new media affect the underlying participation frameworks and how audience involvement affects humour as an interactional process, in both unscripted and scripted (sometimes also fictional) mediatised discourses. This introductory article to the special issue on the creation and sharing of humour across the media also calls attention to the need for multimodal analysis of media humour, which ranges from memes to broadcasts and films, as well as to the processes of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, which are germane to the production and reception of humour in various traditional and new media contexts.

Advancing the concept of multimodal voicing as a tool for describing user-generated online humour, this paper reports a study on humorous COVID-19 mask memes. The corpus is drawn from four popular social media platforms and examined through a multimodal discourse analytic lens. The dominant memetic trends are elucidated and shown to rely programmatically on nested (multimodal) voices, whether compatible or divergent, as is the case with the dissociative echoing of individuals wearing peculiar masks or the dissociative parodic echoing of their collective voice. The theoretical thrust of this analysis is that, as some memes are (re)posted across social media (sometimes going viral), the previous voice(s) – of the meme subject/author/poster – can be re-purposed (e.g. ridiculed) or unwittingly distorted. Overall, this investigation offers new theoretical and methodological implications for the study of memes: it indicates the usefulness of the notions of multimodal voicing, intertextuality and echoing as research apparatus; and it brings to light the epistemological ambiguity in lay and academic understandings of memes, the voices behind which cannot always be categorically known.

This paper gives a comprehensive account of a humorous practice on the IncelTears subreddit, whose aim is to poke fun at, and give a social commentary on, the notorious online community of incels (hateful involuntary celibate men). Based on a representative corpus, the predominant categories of user-generated multimodal items are teased out relative to their form and stance. The central characteristics and socio-pragmatic aims of these humorous practices are discussed, together with the ideological meanings they communicate. Apart from disparaging and critiquing what they consider to be indicative of the pernicious incel ideology, the subreddit community members derive pleasure from the humorous items and forge solidarity links. Overall, this study offers valid conclusions about the (dis)affiliative and informative functions of creative humour on social media represented by the subreddit which humorously addresses a socially relevant, serious problem.

Fast food chain Wendy's has a reputation for its salient humorous promotional campaign on Twitter involving snappy posts commonly called “roasting”. Based on a corpus of tweets posted by Wendy's and duly metapragmatically labelled “roast(ing)”, this paper examines the nature of the company's humour on Twitter. It is thus shown that only some part of the tweets that users and/or commentators deem roasting qualify as roasting in a technical sense (i.e. ritual jocular insults produced in the roastee's honour for the sake of joint amusement), showing the features of the classical roast and the contemporary online RoastMe practice. A large proportion of Wendy's tweets, characterised by creativity, should be seen as cases of witty retorts to users' various challenging tweets or teasing about other companies, a different type of humorous ritual. Still other posts qualify as genuinely aggressive jibes that disparage Wendy's competition. These jibes, as well as some of the retorts, are meant to communicate truthful critical meanings, rather than being merely playful tweets carried out in a humorous frame (the hallmark of roasting). The different forms of creative humour and high responsiveness to users' (non)humorous tweets make for the company's big following and user engagement on Twitter.

This paper addresses the topic of social media users’ polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in...

This article offers a qualitative and quantitative socio-cultural examination of RoastMe, a peculiar humorous practice deployed on Reddit and reposted on various social media. First, RoastMe is characterized from the emic (user) perspective and conceptualized in the light of humor theory (superiority and incongruity approaches). RoastMe consists in some users’ posting pictures of themselves with a view to being roasted, i. e. pelted with jocular insults, by other online community members. Albeit a type of disparagement humor, RoastMe is an innocuous humorous activity enclosed within a humorous frame; it is a form of affiliative humor based on users’ unbounded creativity. Second, this paper reports the findings of a quantitative study on the predominant types of targets/roastees depending on their (lack of) salient features, as well as the source and nature of the jocularly disparaged referents in roasting comments, i. e. the central features that roasters make harmless fun of most often, relative to the different categories of roastees.Roasting (v.) – To humorously mock or humiliate someone with a well-timed joke, diss or comeback. (…) Hone your roasting skills, meet other roasters, and get yourself roasted! Everybody needs to laugh at themselves! And other people, of course!(https://www.reddit.com/r/RoastMe/)

This article reports the findings of a qualitative and quantitative study of seemingly aggressive but inherently benevolent humorous jibes that involve the sexualisation of women in the RoastMe practice performed by a growing social media community on Reddit. Based on a corpus of jocular insults, six forms of sexualisation comments are proposed: hyper-sexualisation, de-sexualisation and meta-sexualisation, each concerning the female body or practices. We account for the distribution of these categories, offering conclusions about humour and sexist ideologies, which RoastMe insults jocularly echo. Although the RoastMe community operates with a humour mindset, producing and recognising sexualisation jibes as a playful activity within a humorous frame, RoastMe insults speak volumes about the contemporary sexist ideologies and the salience of sexuality as a topic arbitrarily invoked in humour performance. This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland (Project number 2018/30/ E/HS2/00644).

This paper reports the findings of a study on the mechanics of insult-retort adjacency pairs in Twitter interactions. The analysis concerns primarily the humorous retorts made by the pornographic entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, who has been pelted with politically-loaded misogynist insults, many of which qualify as slut-shaming. These acts of verbal aggression are the result of her involvement in a legal dispute with President Donald Trump and his former attorney. Based on a carefully collected corpus of public exchanges of tweets, our qualitative analysis achieves a few goals. First, it brings to focus a previously ignored function of witty and creative humour, including the self-deprecating variety, as a powerful rhetorical strategy that helps address insults with dignity and that displays the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the attacker and a good sense of humour, as evidenced by multiple users’ positive metapragmatic evaluations of Stormy Daniels’s retorts. Second, these findings carry vital practical implications for handling misogynist comments, including slut-shaming, online. Third, this study offers new insights into the workings of insults and retorts thereto, not only in multi-party interactions on social media, specifically on Twitter, but also through traditional channels of communication.

Taking as its point of departure a neo-Gricean definition of irony, this article critically revisits the proposal of non-deliberate and unintentional irony, which is shown to address a variety of phenomena captured under the “irony” label. In the light of this critique, a refined version of the production-reception model of the figure of irony is endorsed; irony is produced by the speaker (who needs to have only intentions in action) to be understood by the hearer. The product of ironic communication is joint meaning co-constructed by the interlocutors, which is manifest primarily when the speaker's intended meaning and the hearer's interpretations diverge, of which both interactants become aware. This article also offers a theoretical conceptualisation of a few non-prototypical interactional workings of irony and aspects of interlocutors' negotiating (non)ironic intentions in interactions. The problems addressed include misunderstandings, overtly pretended misunderstandings, and deception based on (non)ironic intentions.

This paper gives the first academic description of RoastMe – a prevalent, but hitherto unexplored, humorous practice formed on Reddit and re-posted on various social media, notably Imgur – in the light of the relevant socio-pragmatic literature on humour and (im)politeness. Taking into account the emic perspective of the RoastMe community of practice (as opposed to recurrent etic “cyberbullying” metapragmatic evaluations), RoastMe is conceptualised as an online humorous activity which, similar to the traditional roast (including the celebrity roast genre), is centred on ritual insults addressed to the target who has agreed to be roasted for the sake of humour. RoastMe is enclosed within a humorous frame (regardless of whether or not insults are truthful, i.e. communicate roasters' true beliefs) and thrives on its community members' unbounded creativity. Roasting comments can also be seen as mock impoliteness, constituting utterances that display overtly pretended face-threat, while being oriented towards amusement and solidarity-building among anonymous users. However, even though the online community of practice conceives RoastMe as an innocuous activity, the possibility of roastees' taking, while not necessarily claiming, offence cannot be ruled out.

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 (notably, the characters’ communicative level and the one of the collective sender and the recipient), 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 seriesHouse.In the course of the analysis, attention is paid to how specific types of deception detailed in the philosophy of language (notably, lies, deceptive implicature, withholding information, covert ambiguity, and covert irrelevance) are deployed through multimodal means in the three types of film deception (extradiegetic deception, intradiegetic deception, and a combination of both when performed by both cinematic and intradiegetic narrators). Finally, inspired by the discussion of Hitchcock’s controversial lying flashback scene inStage Fright, as well as films relying on tacit intradiegetic, unreliable narrators (focalising characters) an attempt is made to answer the thorny question of when the extradiegetic (cinematic) narrator can perform lies (through mendacious multimodal assertions) addressed by the collective sender to the recipient, and not just only other forms of deception, as is commonly maintained.

This paper offers a cross-cultural contrastive study of what we term ‘nation memes’. These are humorous internet memes which refer to a particular country/nation. Our analysis of cultural scripts in memes related to Switzerland is based on a tripartite corpus of digital items shared by Polish, Swiss and international communities. By adopting a grounded-theory approach, we examine the prevalent scripts that represent the Swiss and Switzerland from each of the three perspectives. The results of our qualitative study indicate that Swiss memes are based on experiential knowledge of life in Switzerland, as well as a few stereotypes adopted by the Swiss about their own nation. The Polish subcorpus addresses Switzerland from an outsider perspective by invoking well-known cultural scripts, similar to those on international websites, on which Polish users sometimes scavenge. However, the Polish memescape uses scripts about Switzerland to address problems and scripts specific to Poland. Importantly, nation memes do not necessarily involve humorous disparagement, i.e. they do not always take Switzerland/the Swiss to be the target at which to poke fun when building humorous superiority. Moreover, by referring to their own national vices, the Swiss and Poles sometimes use cultural scripts as the basis for self-deprecating humour.

This essay offers insights into the problematic notions of irony, sarcasm and mock politeness, inspired by Charlotte Taylor’s recent monographMock Politeness in English and Italian. A Corpus-Assisted Metalanguage Analysis. Different understandings of the concept of mock politeness, as well as sarcasm and irony, are succinctly depicted. Some explanation is also provided for the contradictory findings reported in previous scholarship with regard to the im/politeness effects of irony. Additionally, this paper revisits Taylor’s select conclusions about the use of the first-order labels that she considers pertinent to mock politeness (i.e. labels used by lay language users).

This article is meant to give a state-of-the-art picture of cognitive linguistic studies on humour. Cognitive linguistics has had an immense impact on the development of humour research and, importantly, humour theory over the past few decades. On the one hand, linguists, philosophers and psychologists working in the field of humour research have put forward proposals to explain the cognitive processes underlying specifically humour production and reception (e.g. the incongruity-resolution framework and its refinements). On the other hand, humour research has drawn on theories and concepts advanced in contemporary cognitive linguistics taken as a whole (e.g. mental spaces, conceptual blending, salience or conceptual metaphor). The different notions and approaches originating in these strands of research are in various ways interwoven in order to give new insights into the cognitive workings of humour.

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.

Professionals and individuals who invest in equity markets rely on financial analysts’ recommendations and reports to decide on what to invest in and when to trade. This study examines the role of two groups of communication strategies, evaluation markers and mitigators, in establishing analysts’ credibility. The sample consists of 80 reports written in Polish for companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in Poland. In this emerging market setting, where credibility is challenged by uncertainty, analysts deploy various strategies depending on the recommendation they make: “buy,” “hold,” or “sell” shares. The findings point toward a specific group of mitigators, namely subjectivization, as a means of communicating expert opinion. Regression results reveal that investors’ reaction to the publication of a recommendation to “hold” or “sell” shares, measured based on the changes in share prices, is stronger when subjectivization is used in a report. The findings carry implications for research into analyst behavior and for the development of professional writing skills.

This paper addresses a thorny theoretical problem concerning the workings of conversational humour, which is frequently seen as a special mode/frame of communication but, simultaneously, as a vehicle for communicating meanings outside this frame. The first aim is to tease out the different terms prevalent in humour studies that attempt to capture this distinction (such as playfulness, jocularity, or non-seriousness). Second, a proposal is made in favour of the concept of (un)truthfulness, approached from a neo-Gricean perspective, as a notion that can help elucidate this twofold problem better, giving a full spectrum of humour manifestations without causing any terminological contradictions. Grice's first maxim of Quality is thus invoked to account for the main categories of humour distinguished here: autotelic humour (which resides in opting out of this maxim) and speaker-meaning-telic humour (which communicates truthful or covertly untruthful speaker meaning by means of fulfilment, flouting or violation of this maxim and the other ones as well). Speaker meaning may arise as what is said (as a result of maxim fulfilment) and/or implicature (as a consequence of maxim flouting), and both levels of meaning may recruit maxim violations, which lead to deception. This article contributes to the debate on the position of humour in the Gricean framework.

This introductory article gives a state-of-the-art picture of the research on conversational humour in cultural contexts. The most important categories of conversational humour are briefly introduced, followed by an overview of the existing research on conversational humour within and across languages and cultures. The focus is both on topical strands and on the prevalent methodological approaches. The paper closes with a summary of the contributions to this Special Issue.

The primary goal of this paper is to tease out the concepts denoted by the etic and emic labels “irony” and “sarcasm” (i.e. as they are viewed by linguists, and lay language users, here, primarily of American English). Several species of irony are elucidated, most importantly the rhetorical figure and situational irony. The author critically examines various competing academic (etic) approaches, some inspired by emic use, and the thorny relationship between the two focal notions, that is sarcasm and the rhetorical figure of irony. In the light of the different provenance of the two terms “irony” and “sarcasm” (originally operating as emic labels) and the original applications of the two linguistic tools they denote, the perspective advocated here is that sarcasm and irony should be deemed distinct phenomena, which may co-occur, yielding “sarcastic irony”. The empirical study conducted on the basis of transcripts of the discourse of the American television series “House” adduces evidence that generally corroborates the previous findings on the focal emic (meta)pragmatic labels, which are partly not compatible with the preferred etic labels: in emic usage, “sarcasm” typically indicates the presence of the stylistic figure, whereas “irony” is usually reserved for situational irony. Interestingly, in the discourse of the television series, the “irony” label tends to be employed creatively for humorous purposes.

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 (wrongly, as will be claimed here) 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 appears to be a paucity of research on the topic of humour and lying both in interdisciplinary humour studies and in the linguistic or philosophical scholarship on deception, whilst claims and proposals can be found only intermittently in both fields. This chapter addresses the interface between humour and lying, as well as other forms of deception, taking account of two groups of phenomena: categories of humour which pivot on deception/lying and genuine deception/lying which exerts humorous effects. Thus, several notions are elucidated: garden-path humour, put-ons and other lie-based teasing, lying to the recipient, deceptive autotelic humour, and genuine lying in multi-party interactions. Also, against the backdrop of humour theory, a number of postulates are put forward to explain the humorous potential of deception, with lying as a case in point.

This paper aims to differentiate between lying (seen as a type of deceiving) 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 (notably, irony and metaphor), and whose violations result in covert untruthfulness (notably, lying, next to other forms of deception). Both types of untruthfulness are divided into explicit and implicit subtypes depending on the level of meaning on which they are manifest (what is said/made as if to say, or what is implicated). 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”.

Drawing on pragmatic and cognitive philosophical theory, this paper discusses the nature of contrived (un)intentional humour in film talk. The paramount goal is to theoretically depict the processes of intention attribution with regard to humour arising from fictional interactions, as viewed by the recipient. Thus, one blanket category of intentional humour and three categories of unintentional humour in film talk are distinguished and compared with their real-life counterparts. To meet this objective, the author expands on the notion of accountability, which is argued to hold not only for real but also fictional interactions, and the recipient's immersion in the fictional reality with a view to teasing out the central theoretical problems concerning the study of characters’ (non)humorous intentions in film talk.

This introductory chapter sheds light on a number of issues pertinent to the study of humorous intent/intention in interaction. First of all, attention is paid to the notion of intention, as studied across disciplines, and the problems which it invites. Secondly, we revisit a number of recurrent topics in humour research (e.g. humour cues, the play frame, failed humour, as well as humour in scripted and filmed interactions) which are intimately connected with humorous intentions. Most of these issues are reflected in the particular contributions to this Special Issue, which serve as an eclectic representation of how humorous intention can be studied in the future.

This paper explores the workings of deception performed in multi-party interactions, a topic hitherto hardly ever examined by deception philosophers. Deception is here discussed in the light of a neo-Goffmanian classification of (un)ratified hearers and a neo-Gricean version of speaker meaning, anchored in non-reflexive intentionality and accountability, which is shown to operate beyond the speaker-hearer dyad. An utterance, it is argued, may carry different meanings, judged according to their (lack of) intentionality and (non)deceptiveness, towards the individuals performing different hearer roles. The complex mechanisms of deception with regard to different hearers are illustrated with examples culled from the American television series “House.” Deception in fictional interactions is illustrative of real-life manifestations of deception, yet it brings into focus also those rare ones, which are in the centre of philosophical attention.

This introductory chapter gives an overview of empirical approaches to deception and lying that are considered to be of relevance to the pragmatics of the two focal concepts. Attention is thus paid to: the use of natural language data in theoretical debates, the studies of verbal and nonverbal cues for deception, the explorations of people’s understandings of the definitional and moral aspects of lying, as well as the research of deception in children. It is shown that empirical approaches to lying and deception increase our understanding of other theoretical concepts developed by linguists, psychologists and philosophers, and are indeed necessary for further development of pragmatic theory of lying and deception.