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DARIUSZ GALASINSKI. The Language of Deception: A Discourse Analytical Study.

London: Sage Publications, Inc., 2000., xii + 143 p.p. ISBN: 0-7619-0915-X.
The book under review falls within the scope of society and discourse. It brings the
evasiveness of political discourse to bear on truth and lying in linguistic communication.
Extrapolating in the Introduction from deception in TV programs and childrens stories,
Galasinski purports to study the workings of deceptive language in the public domain of
politics, and devotes the second part to an overview of the contents of the book. The
framework within which the study aims to be grounded is a combination of discourse
analysis, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis (CDA), and functional linguistics (FL).
The overwhelming bias to truth in communication is pointed out as The Natural Way of
Being, although in practice lying and deception are the rule everywhere. In a critical
overview of deception, the author holds the truth/falsity and omission view of deception as
implausible, and informs us that research on deception has focused on peoples ability to
detect deception and verbal and non-verbal correlates of deception. He distinguishes
deception by omission, where information is withheld from addressees, and by commission
(sub-divided into explicit and implicit), where information is not withheld. Four different
conceptualisations of deception have been reviewed, namely, (i) information manipulation
theory (IMT), (ii) propositional communication approach, interpersonal deception theory
(IDT), and (iv) general theory of deception.
The conception of deception defended is an information manipulation one, where reality is
misrepresented (p. 36). Three main strategies of deception are isolated: falsification (i.e.
attributing false statements to a debater), distortion (i.e. manipulating by understating or
overstating what a debater states), and de-contextualisation (i.e. taking the words a debater
uses out of their context). Evasive utterances as deceptive are defined as those that are
intended to be semantically irrelevant (p. 59), the reason for not considering evasion as a
strategy of deception on a par with other strategies being that not all instances of evasion are
deceptive.
Galasinski considers the deceptiveness of evasion as metadiscursive (p. 70). This kind builds
on covert evasion, and includes two clusters of strategies where, because metadiscursive
deception aims at rendering what is uncooperative co-operative, either the function of an
utterance is misrepresented (i.e. either by concealing evasion or concealing direct attack) or
its propositional content (i.e. either through implicit misrepresentation or manipulation of
felicity conditions) by masking it (72). Manipulating implicature and presupposition is hard
to challenge. The author made it clear that not all metadiscursive masks are deceptive; a case
in point is boasting.
In conversation, deception can be an act of co-operation between two participants, who
would conspire to present misrepresentations to an audience. The author deals with the
pragmatics of the deceptiveness of evasion more than the pragmatics of deception, and argues
that, in contrast to lying, the success of the speech act of evasiveness is immaterial to evasion
(p. 103). As a pragmatic act parasitic on linguistic communication, deception operates on the
premise that the deceiver relies on the success of the statement in getting the addressee to
believe something false (p. 110).
Leaving aside the controversial nature of the intentionality of deception, the author posits that
the book has three positive points, namely, offering genuine not contrived data as corpus;
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showing how people ascribe to speakers goals different from those they might in fact have
had by using language out of context to deceive; and positing that teaming up to be
uncooperative is possible. Deceptiveness is not, however, language-specific; it can pertain to
the realm of the visual.
The book is mainly grounded in discourse pragmatics, although the author explicitly admits
subscribing to an eclectic framework including CDA and FL, which have been mentioned
(p. 104), but hardly implemented in the course of the analysis. Abstracting away from
ethnomethodological considerations and turn-taking, the method of discourse analysis
adopted is conversation analysis. The exchanges studied consist in dialogic adjacency pairs
(Schiffrin, 1994: 236), analysed in terms of Grices maxims, implicature, presupposition, and
Searles felicity conditions. Although dialogue makes it clear how deception can result from
a manipulation of the speakers utterances propositional content or pragmatic function,
restricting deception to a dialogic dimension suggests that it cannot be found in overt nondialogic discourses like political speeches or advertising, where politicians and ad-makers
may be caught red-handed misrepresenting reality.
Viewing deception as a misrepresentation of reality is certainly a progress over the
conceptualisations reviewed in the book. However, deception as a misrepresentation has been
first offered by Sweetser (1987), which has not been acknowledged by the author. Sweetser
(1987: 60), commenting upon lying as a prototypical act of deception, argues that our
cultural model of representation is essential to our understanding of misrepresentation.
Galasinski considers as potential instances of deception all sorts of departures from truth
accounts of extralinguistic reality, which brings him back to that which he wanted to refute,
namely, the truth-conditional view of deception acknowledged in many places in the book.
Sweetser (1987: 47) argues that lying and deception are understood by reference to a
cultural model of knowledge that we believe to be true. It is a contradiction in terms to
defend Gricean pragmatics as the best framework for deception, and, at the same time, deny
that truth claims are the defining feature of deception, which are the basis of Grices Quality
maxim. Considering evasive utterances as those that are intended to be semantically
irrelevant by postulating semantic relevance is, however, an unnecessary complication.
Pragmatically, evasive utterances are clear cases of maxim exploitation (instances of implicit
or covert opting out, as the author himself pointed out).
References
Schiffrin, Deborah (1994). Approaches to Discourse. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell.
Sweetser, Eve (1987). The Definition of lie: An Examination of the Folk Models Underlying
a Semantic Prototype. In: Dorothy Holland & Naomi Quinn (eds.), Cultural Models
in Language and Thought. Cambridge: CUP, 43-66.
Zouhair Maalej
University of Manouba-Tunis
Faculty of Letters, Manouba
Department of English, Chair
2010, Manouba, Tunis-Tunisia

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