Detecting Deception From The Linguistic Perspective

Deceiving and being deceived is an universal phenomenon in the social life. It can be easily found in physician-patient communication, police interviews, criminal courts as well as in daily life. Therefore, deceit-detection has been paid much attention in many areas of study. This thesis focuses on detecting deception from linguistic perspective in order to observe the linguistic cues in deceptions.Oral accounts, written narratives and computer-mediated communication have been extensively assessed with statement analysis in many previous empirical studies, through which 39 effective cues derived from different techniques are compiled and summarized in accordance with different ways of communication, which are of practical assistance to common people in detecting deception without equipments and training. Moreover, this thesis categorizes effective nonverbal and linguistic cues into different types, which is indicative of the direction of future study.The whole thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter 1 presents a brief introduction to the general framework and the basis for the study. Chapter 2 generalizes three methods of detecting deception briefly by means of literature review, and it mainly focues on verbal methods of deceit-detection and derived linguistic cues. Chapter 3 enters the virtual stage of the study, as it depicts empirical studies about the statement analysis in oral, written narratives and online communication, through which linguistic cues with higher efficacy are compiled. Chapter 4 summarizes the effective linguistic cues according to different forms of communication and language context, and categorizes them into corresponding subbranches, which are suggestive of study in the Chinese context. The last chapter is a conclusion of the whole thesis in which suggestions for further study are presented.