A Study Of Deception In Desperate Housewives From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

In daily life,deception(DEC for short hereafter)is a ubiquitous and special linguistic phenomenon,and has received extensive attention from scholars at home and abroad.They have studied this phenomenon from the perspectives of sociology,ethics,linguistics,philosophy,psychology,etc.,and have achieved remarkable results.These studies focus on logicality,the social world,the physical world,dialogue skills and strategies of the dialogue process and so on.However,these studies hardly analyze psychological mechanism between speakers of DEC,nor a detailed theoretical analysis of DEC discourse from the perspective of pragmatics.This article studies DEC from the perspective of pragmatics,based on the Relevance Theory,and excerpts the contents of the first season of the American drama "Desperate Housewives" as a corpus,using qualitative analysis and exemplification to make dynamic research on the operational mechanism and pragmatic function of the speakers and listeners of DEC in the daily dialogue process.In the course of daily conversation,the DEC between speakers contains not only the lies that the speaker fabricates to hide some facts,but also some DEC discourse strategies such as the omission,concealment and evasion in order to achieve certain communicative purposes in the process of communication,such as maintaining the opposite face,keeping relationship and getting some conveniences and priorities,whose content is true,but it is only a statement of part of the real content and omits the partial authenticity that is harmful to conversational communication.According to Zhang Shuling's definition of DEC,omission,concealment,and evasion are also DEC.Therefore,the thesis does not distinguish DEC from lies in the analysis process for the sake of convenience.In the thesis,the author analyzes the DEC in Desperate Housewives from the perspective of Relevance Theory,and proves that the theory has a strong explanatoryfor the DEC in daily dialogue.The study found that the frequency of occurrence of DEC in the first season of Desperate Housewives is extremely high.The thesis classifies DEC of the first season of Desperate Housewives according to the view of communication,the view of context and relevance.The DEC in daily conversation includes many links.First,the speaker intentionally conceals the true communicative intention,then predicts the hearer's reasoning process and determines the shared context of both sides of discourse according to the common sense,the cultural background of the discourse,the religion,the educational level and other factors,so that conveying unrealistic but easy to understand and accept explicit information to the hearer.Secondly,the hearer associates the existing contextual knowledge with the new information,establishes the correlation between the two and infers the speaker's communicative intention.The use of DEC in the communication process can help the speaker achieve certain communicative purposes,such as hiding the true information and intentions,maintaining the speaker's face,relieving embarrassment and tension as well as enhancing intimacy.Therefore,the thesis provides a new perspective for the application of Relevance Theory and the study of DEC,enriches the research corpus of DEC and increases people's understanding of DEC to improve communicative competence.