A Cognitive Pragmatic Study Of Deception From The Perspective Of Multimodality

The usage of deception is a complicated communicative behavior. Studies of deception have been carried out by many scholars from different perspectives such as ethnics (Roger & Wimal, 1996), psychology (Ekman,1969), etc.. However, the previous studies of deception not only are mainly static which can only partially explain the mechanism and process of deception, but they also lack complete and systematic support of theories with universal explanatory power. This thesis attempts to integrate the latest breakthroughs in both Cognitive Pragmatics (Bara,2010) and Multimodal Interactional Analysis Theory (Norris,2004), to deduce and build up a new analytic model, namely, Cognitive Multimodal Interactional Analysis model, thus carrying out systematic analysis and interpretation of deception, so as to present the whole picture of the generation and comprehension of deceptive meaning.More specifically, the proposed Cognitive Multimodal Interactional Analysis framework is, in chief, built by extracting the essence of Bruno Bara’s (2010) Standard Communication Theory, and deepening and refining Sigrid Norris’(2004) Multimodal Interactional Analysis Theory. According to Bara, the generation and comprehension of meaning undergoes five stages of verbal communication between two participants in a standard speech act. Deception is a nonstandard communication act that generates deceptive information during the third stage-communicative effect. It can be classified into two categories:simple deceit and complex deceit. Sigrid Norris (2004) puts forward Multimodal Interactional Analysis Theory which views discourses as interaction mediated by the interplay of different communicative modes, thus expanding the dimensions of discourse analysis into such aspects as image, sound, and flash etc.. She also originally comes up with three important terms in interaction analysis, namely, communicative mode, modal density and modal configuration. All these insightful ideas mentioned above are of great value of reference, but they mention too little at the operational level.Following the general cognitive principles, the proposed framework, from the perspective of cognitive multimodal interactional analysis, builds up five levels for the generation and interpretation of deception:language-mode-dominated simple deception level, non-language-mode-dominated simple deception level, language-mode-dominated complex deception level, non-language-mode-dominated complex deception level and multimodal complex deception level. In the phase of data collection, the ground on which the American TV series Lie to Me is chosen is that this show is adapted from the real cases psychologist Paul Ekman has worked on, within which there exist large amounts of deception cases. These cases are highly congruous with the present study and moreover, they can undoubtedly enhance the reliability of this research. Based on these considerations, qualitative and quantitative analytic methods are to be frequently utilized in selecting specific cases with representative features of deception in this TV series. Afterwards, the participants, gestures, facial expression, pictures, language etc. involved in the cases are presented in forms of sets of pictures and tables. And these cases are analyzed systematically from various angels and levels in both multimodal and cognitive fields, thus the explanatory power of the proposed model is examined.According to the findings, deception can be classified exhaustively by using the cognitive multimodal interactional analysis framework established in this paper. In addition, this proposed model proves highly operative, feasible and explanatory in the actual practice of case study. Moreover, the proposed framework successfully overcomes the limitations of traditional pragmatic and discourse analysis theories, which is favorable for the analysis of deception from the perspectives of both multimodality and cognition. Furthermore, we can discover the basic process and general law of the generation and comprehension of meaning in deception.Through large amounts of data selection and experiment, a quantity of valuable data are collected and systematically analyzed by the proposed model. However, due to the limitations of the time in research, the researcher’s ability in doing research as well as the research conditions, some multimedia data like sound and videos cannot be presented in the thesis to the full, which may exert an impact on the reliability of the study and which awaits future studies to get over. What’s worth mentioning is that the present study is carried out only by means of limited available technology, which has achieved its initial results. We are convinced that the further studies on deception can be refined by more advanced technology in data collection, through which the cognitive multimodal interactional analysis on deception will render a more fruitful prospect.