Analysis Of Deception Under The Deceptive Miscommunication Theory

Researches on deception ("lie"or"deceptive communication", which we will use interchangeably) (Jaume Masip et al., 2004: 147) have been conducted for more than thirty years. In order to shed light on reasons for lying, the psychological process of lying and how to detect lies, many scholars from various fields like psychology and linguistics have made researches on this subject, and put forward several theoretical hypotheses and models. This thesis intends to apply DeMiT proposed by Anolli et al. (2001) to the analysis of deception by considering deception as a kind of miscommunication act and a chance in communication. So, to some extent, it has expanded the research scope of deception and provided a different approach to the analysis of deception. Furthermore, this thesis will make a main hypothesis about why people often lie and draw a conclusion that lying can make their utterance adapt to context and realize their intentions for a successful communication.Lying is pervasive in our daily lives from public domains, cultural traditions to interpersonal relationship (Galasinski 2000). Lying plays an important role in our daily conversations as a way to avoid embarrassment and hurting others, or just to save one's face and image. This thesis mainly discusses the lies in interpersonal relationship.This thesis firstly asserts that the choice of lying strategy is a result of linguistic choice making and the production of communicative interact. Then, as an essential feature of deceptive communication, the intention of lying links between miscommunication and default communication, therefore the intentional gradation will be scrutinized, with an aim to answer the question why people often lie. After that, this thesis examines in detail the dynamic relationship between lying and context. Lastly, this study ends with a discussion about"metarepresentation". With reference to the present issue, this thesis indicates that the dynamic process can not occur automatically. In fact, the choice of lying strategy and the communicative interact process are fundamentally influenced by the degrees of metarepresentation in the interlocutors'minds.