In spite of a large, growing body of research into the deceptive communication of phishing attacks and the apparent discrepancy between the well-accepted definition of deception and its application to actual instances of phishing emails, scarce attention has been given to a cognitive-pragmatic account of the categorization of deception.
Based on Langacker’s (1993) cognitive reference-point model and especially the intention-and-inference approach proposed by Bach & Harnish (1979), the current research is primarily concerned with exploring how a natural corpus of email messages is perceived as having a deceptive intention. Here we argue that the categorization of deception is in effect an inferential process of identifying the sender’s illocutionary intention in which human cognitive ability in reference-point reasoning comes into play. Specifically, the present study seeks to tackle three research questions concerning 1) the common attributes of the target email texts in terms of linguistic manifestation, 2) the function of these common features as reference points, and 3) an account of their reference-point status.
The overall analysis and results show that all the email texts can be said to be similar to one another in four respects: text-based asynchronous computer-mediated communication, stranger sender, money-related topic, and request for the recipient’s personal information. In general, upon perceiving the set of common features which are systematically realized in diverse types of speech acts ranging over ascriptives, apologizes, descriptives, promises, informatives, offers, and directives, etc., an assortment of negative feelings and beliefs are called up at large among the readers which are conducive firstly to the features’ gaining perceptual salience to serve a reference-point function and ultimately to deception categorization on the whole.
The major contribution of the study is that it offers original insights into the linguistic manifestation, semantic make-up, and cognitive process of deception parasitic on emails. Moreover, a discussion of the reference-point phenomenon at discourse level does have practical application and relevance in interpreting deceptive language as a ubiquitous part of human communication.
References:
Bach, K. & Harnish, R. M. (1979). Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1993). Reference point constructions. Cognitive Linguistics, 4(1), 1-38.
