An Analysis Of Deception In Pretty Little Liars From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Deception pervades every aspect of our lives as it is practiced habitually in day-to-day life either for the sake of polite compliment or for the sake of one’s own motivations. Researches on it have been conducted by scholars in various disciplines, namely, philosophy, ethics, psychology, sociology, linguistics and pragmatics, both at home and abroad. Most studies have been carried out to identify the definitions, categories, research approaches and pragmatic functions of deception. Additionally, certain achievements have been acquired and established among the pragmatic investigations, but which are mainly based on the framework of Gricean Cooperative Principle, Leech’s Politeness Principle (1983) and Brown & Levinson’s Face Theory (1978). In recent years. Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory has aroused increasing attention of scholars in pragmatic field, which has offered a new perspective to the further researches on deception.In accordance with Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, language using is a process of continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, deception is taken as an outcome of linguistic choices made by language users. The three hierarchically related key notions (variability, negotiability and adaptability) provide the access and possibility to appropriate choices-making. In addition, four angles of investigation (contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes) should be taken into account. The discussion of the present thesis has been carried out based on the above four angles of investigation.Firstly, language users make deceptive choices to achieve certain communicative goals. Variability provides access to language users to make continuous choices, consciously or unconsciously, among the kinds of languages, the styles of language, and so on. Additionally, the choice-making has to adapt to language users’mental world, social world and physical world. And the linguistic choice made by language users can take place at all possible levels of linguistic structures. Furthermore, this linguistic choice-making process is a dynamic adaptation process and these choices-making are negotiable on the basis of contextual, cognitive and social considerations, which can function as pragmatic strategies. Moreover, not all choices, whether production or interpretation, are made with equal consciousness. Some are virtually automatic, while others are highly-motivated.This study takes the dialogues excerpted from Pretty Little Liars as the main corpus. Pretty Little Liars is a hit television series adaptation based on novels written by Sara Shepard. The novels have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. The idea was described as "Desperate Housewives for teens". Until now, there are no other theses that have conducted researches on this TV series. The present thesis employs Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory to explicate deceptions occurring in intercommunicative conversation by adopting qualitative research. This study aims to give more clear definitions of deception, to present a more adequate analysis on deception in concrete conversation, to uncover underlying reasons of deception-employing, to analyze and discuss the pragmatic functions of deception and to make contributions to crossover research on linguistics and movie literature. The author hopes that through the analysis, people will get better comprehension about the show and meanwhile gain an overall understanding of the pragmatic strategies and the related pragmatic functions of deception.There are five chapters in the thesis.Chapter one is a brief introduction to the whole thesis including the research background, objectives, methodology and structure of the thesis.Chapter two focuses on the leading three types of definition presented by researchers from various fields, enumerating several groups on the classifications of deception and discussing previous studies on deception both at home and abroad.Chapter three presents the overview of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, which serves as the theoretical foundation for the present deception research. Choice-making is first being delineated; three hierarchically related key notions of language have been exhibited, namely, variability, negotiability and adaptability; and four angles of investigation (contextual correlates, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes) in language use are analyzed in detail.Chapter four is the critical part in this paper. First, the author at great length introduces the TV series Pretty Little Liars:second, the author applies Jef Verschueren"s Linguistic Adaptation Theory to examine deception in Pretty Little Liars from aspects of contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation processes.Chapter five makes a general conclusion in line with the previous analysis and discussion. It summarizes the whole study, points out some limitations of the thesis and presents some suggestion for future studies.The new ideas of the thesis are as follows:First of all, the paper is featured with novel corpus; there is no other linguistic works presenting to analyze this TV drama. Secondly, in the process of deception analysis, unlike most of the previous studies which only focus on the communicative context, the author has also argued deception from the other three correlates of adaptability. At last, adaptation theory has provided a new perspective to appreciate and understand Pretty Little Liars. With the application of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory to the analysis of deceptive information, which has revealed the personality, emotion, motivation, social relationship and etc., audience can have a better understanding and interpretation of this TV drama.