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10 JLL 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/jlangaw10 and id is 1 raw text is: International Journal of LANGUAGE & LAW L6pez, JL L 1o (2021) 1-23 Did Samuel Bronston Commit Perjury? - A Study in Discourse Semantics Luis L6pez* Abstract In the landmark case Bronston v. US, the Supreme Court put forward a reading of the perjury statute according to which one could only be tried for perjury on the basis of what one had stated, not what was implicated. This decision has given rise to a number of theoretical and practical problems, best detailed in Tiersma (1990) and Douglis (2018). This article argues that a formal investigation of discourse structure, of the type developed in Asher and Las- carides (2003), coupled with an understanding of the role of ellipsis in discourse, allows us to develop a framework that captures those instances of perjury that seem to fall through the cracks of the literal truth condition without introducing speaker's intent on the solution. The crucial idea that the analysis hinges on is the notion that an indirect answer to a question is a two-node discourse with an elliptical polarity answer. Approaches based on Grice's implica- tures or speaker's communicative intent are discussed and shown to be inadequate. Keywords perjury, implicature, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, discourse structure Submitted: 18 July 2019, accepted: 29 November 2019, published online: 26 February 2021 * University of Illinois at Chicago, L1.oe~u ced International Journal of Language & Law vol.1o (2021)