Pragmatic Perspective On Gender Differences Of Deception In Verbal Communication

Researches on Deception (DEC) have been prevailed for several decades, however, most of them confine their focuses on the DEC in narrow sense ---lying study (e.g. the psychological process of lying and how to detect lies). Few researchers touched upon the inner mechanisms of DEC adoption and took gender as a variable into DEC's study. And a large number of those scholars who have already carried out researches on gender differences of DEC are still keen on exploring the gender differences of verbal or non-verbal cues leaked during deception or the differences on language choices on the lexical level while applying DEC.This thesis attempts to view DEC from pragmatic perspective on the basis of the Relevance-adaptation theory through which a theoretical framework of deception is presented to further disclose the actual operation and mechanism of DEC in verbal communication. First and foremost, the author refines the working definition of DEC and further illustrates the differences and similarities among DEC, lying and some other rhetorical devices. The falseness of the statement does not necessarily constitute the precondition of deceptive communication. Instead intentionality is the element matters most. In verbal communication, everyone is continuously making linguistic and strategic choices, either consciously or unconsciously. Deception is considered as a communicative strategy employed by the speaker to achieve certain communicative goals by intentionally manipulating the information. The functioning of deceptive communication from the Relevance-adaptation perspective mainly involve the process of making optimal relevance presumptions of the cognitive contexts and make related adaptations to conversational contexts to fulfill certain communicative goal.The questionnaire is adopted in this thesis, aiming to reveal how people of different genders differ in their response to deception in various communication situations. During the research, the following results are found: Females are more inclined to utter other-oriented DEC to take other's benefit into consideration or avoid others from being embarrassed while males are more likely to employ self-oriented DEC so as to fulfill certain communicative goals; To both genders, types of DEC strategies may vary according to different levels of intimacy of their deception targets. Males and females have the tendency to utter higher level of deceptive strategies such as falsification and distortion to people of less intimate relationship especially to those with higher power and social solidarity, within which males employs more exaggerated deception than females; In most cases, females are found to carry greater shame degree after being caught adopting DEC than males do; However, males show greater tolerance towards DEC and are more likely to forgive those who use DEC strategy to themselves.Finally, the thesis also makes analysis to investigate the causes of the above gender difference presented during DEC employment. By virtue of the relevance and adaptation theory, we are informed that deception could be regarded as a strategic choice-making adopted by the addressor to make their utterance adapt to the communicative contexts of both the addressor and the addressee. In order to fulfill certain communicational goals, people have to make adaptations to the three contexts both in the linguistic and pragmatic form. The gender differences occurring in the deception may be largely due to the different situational and background contexts and are supposed to adapt themselves to, which may have close links with different sub-cultural background, social power solidarity and psychological factors.