Bad Language

Overview:
The cognitive and social benefits of language are undeniable. Nevertheless, we also use it to manipulate, devalue, mislead or simply lie to other people. On one hand, we often take advantage of the fact that we can communicate much more with a linguistic utterance than is literally said with it, but we can easily deny responsibility for this indirectly communicated content. On the other hand, we exploit the fact that language is very well suited to evoking emotional reactions in others and thus making them particularly willing to act. In this project, Nikola Kompa, together with Tim Henning (University of Mainz) and Christian Nimtz (University of Bielefeld), is investigating the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms that make such uses possible.