Exaggeration
How can we understand the rhetorical function that exaggeration plays in settings from everyday conversation to political discourse? My view is that hyperbole is not a rational linguistic phenomenon, but rather a result of cognitive processing akin to that involved in super-normal stimuli like caricatures or Tinbergen's famous herring gull beaks. I want to understand these phenomena better and investigate how to think about the relation between exaggeration and truthfulness. How can we distinguish harmless exaggeration from malicious hyperbole?
When fact-checking (e.g. political) discourse, cases of hyperbole are often the easiest false statements to catch, since they present matters to be implausibly extreme. But they are also easily dismissed as harmless, since one may think that hyperbole is merely an exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Still, hyperboles can be - and regularly are - deceptive, as they trigger inferences that may or may not be true. Surprisingly, we have no theoretical or empirical grasp of such inferences, nor of the role they play in deceptive uses of exaggeration. The Tall Tales Project will collect data both on the interpretation of hyperboles and on what affects people’s perception of the sincerity of an exaggerated statement. We develop predictive computational models that capture the difference between honest and dishonest hyperbole. We do this by adopting the novel perspective described above, namely that hyperbole is the linguistic manifestation of the general cognitive utility of exaggeration.
Tall Tales is a 5 year NWO Open Competition Large project that will start in 2027. Soon more!