| Lies are everywhere. We have come to realize more than ever that lying, as a mode of deceptive communication, has been frequently used by people from all walks of life. The explosion of deception literature during the 80s and the 90s was detonated by the growing awareness, by scholars and the general public, of the astounding number of lies told everyday by the news media, politicians, marketing professionals, coworkers, friends and even loved ones. Therefore, detecting deception has become an important task and played a central role in our daily life. However, the recent researches on language deception are mainly concerned with law enforcement, politics and psychology, but no research deals with the language itself (the nature of language). Language, as a symbol of communication, or as a representation, is inevitably attached to covertness and deceptiveness. This thesis chooses news language as the linguistic data and adopts the semiotic approach to analyze the data and to examine how the deceptive message works and how language can be used to make a deceit. The purpose of the present study is to raise the level of awareness about the deceptiveness of language in the interpretation of deceptive expressions in a text (discourse)-based situation, and strengthen the linguistic consciousness in order to better understand the nature of sign. The viewpoint is set forth in five chapters.The first chapter firstly attempts to give a general introduction of the background of the study and the linguistic data that the thesis is intended to investigate, then briefly explain the methodology and the organization that the thesis adopts. Chapter Two is devoted to the comprehensive review of literature of the previous studies on language deception. In this part different approaches are discussed: Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA), Reality Monitoring (RM), Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN), Verbal Immediacy (VI) and Interpersonal Deception Theory (IDT). And the achievements and limitations of these approaches are pointed out. Chapter Three analyzes the prevalence of language deception and introduces the definition of deception by Scholar Galasinski and other researchers. Then through analyzing the relationship between semiotics and linguistics, the thesis tries to define the concept of deception from the semiotic perspective and emphasizes the importance of the semiotic approach to linguistic phenomenon. Chapter Four provides with the analytical theory of the language deception, primarily focusing on the analysis of media discourse. Firstly, it points out the deceptiveness of language in news reports, and then introduces the most commonly used methods to make a deceit in news reports. Nominalization is the most typical and important way. By examining its linguistic features and functions—to use less vigorous and direct noun forms, to lessen the offensive nature and to conceal information in order to cover up the real intention, the thesis will reveal how the nominalization causes deception. Besides, frequency words, the irregularities of reference, indefinite pronouns/adjectives and rounders are major means used in news reporting, and the thesis also discusses the language deception from these aspects. At the end of the thesis, the last chapter summarizes the study by offering conclusions and implications and suggestions for future research studies. Limitations of the study are also discussed. The present research is the first attempt to adopt the semiotic approach to study deception detection in media discourse and the findings may provide a new perspective for linguists to detect deception, and my thesis may provide a new angle of approaching the language of news reports in this regard. The realizations of deception in news language are not exhausted in my short paper. The conducted analyses may not be complete and precise. When this approach is combined together with other methods, we are more aware of the language deception, and deception detection can be more accurate. |
PDF Full Text Request