A Case Study Of Deception In Desperate Housewives Within The Framework Of Adaptation Theory

Deception is a common and special linguistic phenomenon in our daily life. In the past, many scholars did the researches on deception from different perspectives, such as, ethics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and so on. Some of scholars made certain achievements, and established the theories and methodologies for analyzing deception. With the development of pragmatics, more and more scholars began to study deception from the perspective of pragmatics. Adaptation theory, as an important research orientation in pragmatics, attracted the attentions of many researchers. Hence, this paper makes a trail on analyzing deception within the framework of adaptation theory. The general hypothesis of this thesis is:as a pragmatic strategy, deception is the outcome of linguistic choices made by language user with different degree of salience, in order to achieve the communicative goals. And this linguistic choice-making process is a dynamic adaptation process, in which the deception choice-making has to adapt to the communicative context, among which the utterer and interpreter’mental world, social world, and physical world are the main elements. And the pragmatic values of deception operated in verbal communication as a pragmatic strategy are:a. Achieving certain communicative goals; b. Avoiding conflict between communicators; c. Improving interpersonal relationships. In this paper, the author will study deception in verbal communication of Desperate Housewives within the framework of adaptation theory to prove the validity of this hypothesis and the pragmatic values, and finally it can verify the explanatory power of adaptation theory for deception in verbal communication.