• Oswald Steve

When people attempt to deceive their interlocutors in communicative settings, they usually rely on language. This proseminar will explore the linguistic manifestations of deception by surveying the linguistic, pragmatic and discursive means manipulators may use to further their ends. Different deceptive phenomena will be discussed, such as lies, half-truths, omissions, evasive answers, hedges, fallacious arguments, irrelevant statements, etc. and at the same time several theoretical frameworks that account for the way deception works in language will be surveyed, covering approaches in critical discourse analysis, argumentation theory, cognitive linguistics, and (cognitive) pragmatics. While it proves hard to precisely pinpoint intrinsic manipulative features to specific linguistic formulations, it is nonetheless informative to survey different manipulative usages of linguistic material. As a consequence, in this seminar students will be expected to analyse manipulative discourse to reveal the inner workings of verbal deception.

Attendance and participation are compulsory. A written essay (3’500 words) perhaps combined with an oral presentation, depending on attendance (to be decided in week 2 or week 3), will earn students the 6 ECTS.

At the end of the proseminar, students should be able to:

• define what deceptive communication amounts to and know the different definitions available in contemporary research on the topic
• use different theoretical frameworks to analyse the manipulative potential of linguistic material and to explain its potential success

The list of bibliographical references will be given session after session and made available on Moodle