The Pragmatics of Deception in American Presidential Electoral Speeches

Abstract

Language is used for influencing people. Various means, whether honest or dishonest, are appealed to for achieving this purpose. This means that people fulfill their goals either through telling their interlocutors the truth or through deceiving and misleading them. In this regard, deception is a key aspect of many strategic interactions including bargaining, military operations, and politics. However, in spite of the importance of this topic, it has not been pragmatically given enough research attention particularly in politics. Thus, this study sets itself the task of dealing with this issue in this genre from a pragmatic perspective. Precisely, the current work attempts to answer the following question: What is the pragmatics of deception in American presidential electoral speeches? Pragmatics, here, involves the speech acts used to issue deceptive utterances, deceptive strategies resulting in the violation of Grice's maxims, as well as cognitive strategies.In other words, this study aims at finding out the answer to the question raised above. In accordance with this aim, it is hypothesized that American presidential candidates use certain deceptive/misleading strategies to achieve their goals. In this regard, they utilize certain strategies which violate Grice's maxims such as ostensible promise, equivocation, fabrication, and dissociation. Moreover, they make use of certain cognitive strategies like: metaphor, presupposition, and positive self-representation/ negative other representation.In order to achieve the aim of the study and verify or reject its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under examination. Besides, a statistical means represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the results. The most important finding arrived at by this study is that American presidential candidates most often resort to the strategies of giving an ostensible promise, equivocation, presupposition, and positive self/negative other representation to fulfill their goals.