The aim of the paper is to indicate the most general types of Polish falsehood verbs. The presented typology is based on their syntactic and semantic features. Depending on what kind of an argument a verb takes, the propositional or the nominal one, and if it co-occurs with the phrease w milczeniu or milcząc (keeping silence) or not, we obtain four types of falsehood verbs. We can distinguish VFL+sent. verbs, which take a proposition as an argument and refer to the activity which cannot be performed in agent's silence, like bajać, że, bajdurzyć, że, bredzić, że, bujać, że, chrzanić, że, kręcić, że. Some of them assert the speaker's knowledge of what is said, while others implicate the speaker's ignorance of the propositional content. There is also a group of VFS+sent. verbs, which take a proposition as an argument and can be left without an actual utterance, like blefować, żę, fantazjować, że, nabrać kogoś, że, symulować, że, upozorować, że. They include verbs which tell us about bad intentions of the agent. Verbs of the next type, i.e. VFL-sent., do not take a propositional argument and do not allow silent performance, these include: koloryzować coś, minąć się z prawdą, ołgać kogoś, pleść trzy po trzy, przeinaczyć coś, wyssać z palca. They differ depending on what kind of object the agent is dealing with. In the last type, we classify VFS-sent. verbs, which do not take a propositional argument and the activities they denote can be done without an actual utterance, for example: kantować kogoś, manipulować kimś, podrobić coś, przywłaszczyć sobie, sfabrykować coś, sfałszować coś. Some of them presuppose negative evaluation of the agent while others do not.
This paper is dedicated to the analysis of semantic properties of three Polish verbs: okłamywać się, że [p] (to lie to oneself that [p]), oszukiwać się, że [p] (to deceive oneself that [p]) and wmówić//wmawiać sobie, że [p] (to convince oneself that [p]). The author presents arguments in favour of the thesis that these are separate lexical units, which cannot be reduced to appropriate addressative verbs. In their semantic structure, she distinguishes, apart from the agent (epistemic subject), also the position of the controller-sender (metasender), and uses a conceptual distinction between quotative speech (present in the structure of the examined units) and assertoric speech in her analysis. By clashing the properties of Polish exponents of ‘samooszustwo’ (self-deception) and two competing types of philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon, the author supports anti-reductionist approaches, which do not identify self-deception with a lie or deception. She emphasises that none of the lexical exponents referring to this phenomenon implies ‘oszustwo’ (a deception) or ‘kłamstwo’ (a lie). None implies such a characteristic of the agent as is a sine qua non condition for the occurrence of any of the two situations either. From the perspective of language, ‘samooszustwo’ (self-deception) is not deception. It is a kind of an irrational action that is inconsistent with the agent’s knowledge.
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