Meiosis and hyperbole as scalar phenomena

Abstract

Meiosis and hyperbole are phenomena that involve deliberate under- and overstatements that are uttered without the intention to deceive or otherwise break with cooperative communication. Much of the literature on these figures of speech concerns the specific rhetorical roles they play as well as their relation to other tropes, like metaphor and irony. In this work, I intend to study meiosis and hyperbole from a truth-conditional perspective. In particular, I look at how we can define under- and overstatement in terms of the relation between the propositional content and a contextually salient scale. The resulting theory is empirically grounded by empirical tests and formalized in a standard framework of possible world semantics. The advantage of doing this is twofold: (i) it will become possible to provide formal clarity on how to classify certain untruthful utterances and (ii) we can make explicit the role semantic content plays in the deliberate utterance of untruthful statements.