http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/WEILIN.html

This website summarizes an author who argues that lying is a function not of words but of sentences; it belongs to the semantic aspect of language.

Stanton Wortham and Michael Loche create a category they call "embedded metapragmatics" to describe the linguistic patterns that bracket and defer falsifiability (usually by layering and/or qualifying testimony), often in ways that inevitably solicit certain representations and particular perceptions of events and persons, often in a moral framework.

"Reporters virtually always place the metapragmatic descriptions of lying and other moral transgressions in the mouth of the second embedded speaker."

"Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation. But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes. This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as "truth" from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real." Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in An Extra Moral Sense

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