A Study Of Lying From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Lying, as a speech act, is pervasive in every corner of our lives, both public and private. However, it has been regarded as violation of truth and moral standards and thus been condemned for so long. The prevalent existence of lying justifies its significance in communication and rich pragmatic functions.Since lying is an interdisciplinary course, there are abundant researches and results. First, the previous study of lying is critically examined, such as Galasinski's pragmatic analysis (2000), Coleman and Kay's prototype analysis (1981), Sweetser's Ideal Cognitive Model analysis (1990) and analysis from Cooperative Principle and Politeness Theory. Lying obviously violates the maxim of quality of Cooperative Principle (CP). CP is only concerned with the messages of lying and thus fails to dig out the cognition process underlying the superficial messages. Politeness Theory also fails to provide a theoretical framework for lying, since it can only account for part of white lies. Two problems still remain unsolved. First, the previous researchers have not agreed on any definition of lying. Furthermore, none of these studies touch on the cognitive aspect of lying. Therefore, this paper sets out to fulfill three tasks: providing a definition of lying, interpreting lying from the cognitive perspective and summarizing the pragmatic functions of lying.Based on the previous research, the author proposes a definition of lying and classifies it into the harmful lie and the white lie in terms of face caring. The author has selected lies from daily life, newspaper, film transcripts and analyzed these lies from a qualitative approach. Relevance Theory is an energetic theory to account for human communication from the cognitive perspective. It has shown great explanation power for a variety of language phenomena. The author attempts to answer the two questions why people lie and how people lie within the framework of Relevance Theory. Lying is closely examined from three key notions: ostensive and inferential model, mutual manifestness and cognitive environment, and Principle of Relevance.First, the author tries to find why people lie in terms of intentions. Owing to the conflict between the informative intention and the communicative intention, the speaker has to send what he regards as false information to the addressee. Second, the ostensive-inferential model is employed to indicate how people lie. Lying consists of two processes: the liar's ostension and the addressee's inference. On the one hand, the liar makes manifest the fabricated "assumptions" which seemingly the most relevant and accessible to the addressee. On the other hand, the addressee interacts the new input with the previous experience, physical environment, and encyclopedic entries to achieve the contextual effect.Next, the paper examines the relevance of lies. The white lie is intended to care for the face and satisfy people's psychological expectations. Therefore, it can yield positive cognitive effect and it is relevant to the addressee. However, there is a contradiction between the success of lying and the relevance of the harmful lie. The successful harmful lie is of no relevance to the addressee although the liar achieves his communicative intention. Instead, the unsuccessful harmful lie is relevant to the addressee. It is found that Relevance Theory pays attention to both the speaker's intention and the hearer's inference but fails to balance the role in the ostensive-inferential model. Finally, the author draws a conclusion that the notion of relevance is too vague to balance the speaker's intention and the hearer's interpretation.Finally, the author summarizes the pragmatic functions of both harmful lie and white lie. Harmful lies have a major function: deceptive function, which is to deceive others in order to avoid danger or trouble or to trick others into doing something beneficiary to the liar. White lies have even richer functions: achieving phatic goal, safeguarding the face by compliments and avoidance of argument, relieving tension or embarrassment, encouraging, and serving as an indirect refusal.