Abstract
Previous research into deception detection has argued that deception is more cognitively demanding than truth-telling. This additional cognitive load can lead to changes in linguistic and non-linguistic behavior, which in turn can be considered cues to deception (e.g., DePaulo, Lindsay, Malone, Muhlenbruck, Charlton, & Cooper, 2003). While the majority of deception research is rooted in psychology, this research approaches deception from a linguistics perspective by proposing and empirically testing a feature of language used to manage the cognitive demands of interpersonal communication. Since formulaic sequences—an umbrella term for sequences of words including metaphors, clichés, collocations, and routinized phrases—are stored holistically as single lexical items, they make the act of producing language less cognitively demanding. It is therefore hypothesized that individuals may seek to compensate for the additional cognitive demands of lying by increasing their reliance on formulaic sequences. To test this assertion, formulaic sequences were identified in a corpus of 1600 deceptive and truthful hotel reviews (Ott, Choi, Cardie & Hancock, 2011), totaling 239,113 words, using an automated procedure based on a specially compiled dictionary of formulaic sequences. The results shed light on the relationship between formulaic sequences and deceptive language, their potential role in detecting deception, and the generalizability of findings to other types of texts.
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Larner, S. (2019). Formulaic Sequences as a Potential Marker of Deception: A Preliminary Investigation. In: Docan-Morgan, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Deceptive Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96334-1_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96334-1_17
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