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Falsehood in Speech and Some Means of Its Expression

Lusine Mnatsakanyan
Yerevan State University

T his study serves to attain a better understanding of deception types and the natureof verbal manipulation. Psychology and psycholinguistics are among those sci-
entific spheres which touch upon the concept of “lie” in speech, thus revealing some
methods if its detection. 

Psycholinguistic approaches to language are quite varied, from those that are con-
cerned with the more concrete operations of the physiological systems involved in pro-
ducing and perceiving language signals to the more abstract cognitive systems, including
memory. Today psycholinguistics explores the relationship between the human mind and
language. It treats the language user as an individual rather than a representative of a
society; an individual whose linguistic performance is determined by the strengths and
limitations of the mental apparatus. In fact, the notion “language” that is a product of the
human mind gives rise to two interconnected goals: 
1. to establish an understanding of the processes which underlie the system we call lan-

guage,
2. to examine language as a product of the human mind and thus as evidence of the way

in which human beings organize their thoughts and impose patterns upon their expe-
riences (Garman 1990:15).
Lying, the main point of discussion in this study, is a widespread phenomenon which

everyone does to some extent. The capacity to lie is noted early and nearly universally in
human development. A lie is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement,
especially with the intention to deceive others, often with the hope to maintain a secret
or reputation, protect someone’s feelings or to avoid a punishment. To lie is to state some-
thing that one knows to be false or that one doesn’t honestly believe to be true with the
intention that a person will take it for the truth. A liar is a person who is lying, who has
previously lied, or who tends by nature to lie repeatedly.

The philosophers Saint Augustine, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel
Kant, condemned all lying. However, Thomas Aquinas also had an argument for lying.
According to all three, there are no circumstances in which one may lie. One must be
murdered, suffer torture, or endure any other hardship, rather than lie even if the only
way to protect oneself is to lie. Each of these philosophers gave several arguments
against lying, all compatible with each other. Among the more important arguments are:

Lying is a perversion of the natural faculty of speech, the natural end of which is to
communicate the thoughts of the speaker. 

When one lies, one undermines trust in society. 
Lying is typically used to refer to deceptions in oral and written communication.

Other forms of deception, such as disguises or forgeries are generally not considered lies,
though the underlying intent may be the same. However, a true statement can be consid-
ered a lie if the person making that statement is doing so to deceive. In this situation, it

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is the intent of being untruthful rather than the truthfulness of the statement itself that is
considered. 

According to Michael Garman (1990) there can be distinguished several types of lies:
• Big lie: a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impu-

dence to distort the truth so infamously.
• Bluffing: an act of deception that occurs during the game (a gambler deceives other

player).
• Bold-faced lie: a bold-faced lie is one which is told when it is obvious to all con-

cerned that it is a lie. (For example, a child who has chocolate all around his mouth
and denies that he has eaten any chocolate has told a bold-faced lie).

• Contextual lie: one can state part of the truth out of context, knowing that without
complete information, it gives a false impression.

• Emergency lie: an emergency lie is a strategic lie told when the truth may not be told
because, for example, harm to a third party would result.

• Exaggeration:  an exaggeration occurs when the most fundamental aspects of a state-
ment are true, but only to a certain degree. It is also seen as “stretching the truth” or
making something appear more powerful, meaningful, or real than it actually is.

• Fabrication: a fabrication is a lie told when someone submits a statement as truth
without knowing for certain whether or not it actually is true. Although the statement
may be possible, it is not based on a fact. Rather, it is something made up or misrep-
resentation of the truth (a person giving a direction to a tourist when the person does
not actually know it).

• Misleading: a misleading statement is one where there is no outright lie, but still
retains the purpose of getting someone to believe in an untruth.

• Noble lie: a noble lie is one which would normally cause discord if it were uncov-
ered, but which offers some benefit to the liar and assists in an orderly society,
therefore potentially beneficial to others. It is often told to maintain law, order and
safety.

• Perjury: perjury is the act of lying or making verifiable false statements on a material
matter under oath or affirmation in a court of law, or in any various sworn statements in
writing. Perjury is a crime, because the witness has sworn to tell the truth and for the
credibility of the court to remain intact, witness testimony must be relied on as truthful.

• Puffery: it is an exaggerated claim typically found in advertising and publicity
announcements, such as “the highest quality at the lowest price”.

• White lie: it is an acceptable lie that helps others. Such lies are required in many cul-
tures where saving face is important, and not telling lies to protect others is consid-
ered a bad and selfish thing. These lies are also more acceptable from those who are
less likely to know the rules for not lying, most notably young children. A white lie
would cause only relatively minor discord if it were uncovered, and typically offers
some benefit to the hearer. White lies are often used to avoid offense, such as com-
plimenting something one finds unattractive. In this case, the lie is told to avoid the
harmful realistic implications of the truth. As a concept, it can not be clearly separat-
ed from other lies.

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Sometimes, being truthful isn’t always the best. There are times when one wants to
avoid the full truth, or even tell a lie, in order to protect someone’s feelings, or prevent a
conflict. So, one of the most relevant issues in studying lies is the concept of “Lie-to-chil-
dren”. A lie-to-children is a lie, often a platitude which may use euphemisms which are
told to make an adult subject acceptable to children. Parents lie for many reasons; lying
to keep a child from crying when s/he heads out for dinner, or to protect him/her from
scary issues, such as lying a child about a murder in the news. Common example is the
Santa Claus. Parents tell their child fairy stories, about Santa Claus who is “real”, and
later on it turns out that the child has been lied to. But actually nobody wants to lie to
their kids, but also nobody wants to bring them up without believing in those things that
make a child’s life happy: joy, love, hope and magic are what capture a child’s imagina-
tion. But one day the child will reach the stage of mental maturity where s/he will detect
the lie that the parent has told for the first time. Before that s/he took for granted the fact
that the parent was incapable of lying. The thing is that kids need to learn how the world
works. Still, lying wouldn’t exist if there was no purpose for it. Lies can and often do
accomplish good ends that the truth wouldn’t. A classical example is lying to an axe-mur-
derer to prevent further harm.

We cannot prevent children from telling a lie, as they come across it even in fic-
tion. Such as “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” which covers the story about
an 18th century baron who tells outrageous, unbelievable stories which he claims are
all true. Or “Carlo Pinocchio” who was a wooden puppet often led into trouble by his
propensity to lie. His nose grew with every lie; hence long noses have become cari-
catures of liars.

On the contrary, it is alleged that some belief systems may find lying to be justi-
fied, that is “the product of deception and lies for a good purpose”. Let’s consider
lying in the Bible. Various passages of the Bible (Old Testament) feature exchanges
that are conditionally critical of lying, but in some passages lying seems conditional-
ly promoted.

How to detect a lie? Lie detection is the practice of determining whether someone is
lying or not. It commonly involves the polygraph. Many scientists reviewed lie detector
research and came to the conclusion that there is no scientific evidence supporting that
lie detectors actually work.

A classic psycholinguistic problem is parole, or its modern formulation – “perfor-
mance”. The latter is being viewed as a dialectic of opposite cognitive modes, namely of
gesture imagery and language.  It is quite natural that so much significance is attached to
the study of body language, for our bodily movements and facial expressions constitute
an integral part of speech; in fact, they often act as a vehicle for emotion, whether we
want it or not. Hence we may state that non-verbal gestures are just as important as spo-
ken words. Why? It is the body language that has the power to give away a person’s true
intentions.

Thus, for instance, watching facial expressions in order to determine whether a per-
son is lying might just save from being a victim of fraud, or it could help figure out
when somebody’s being genuine. The experienced psychologists have yielded certain

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results, for instance the micro expressions (facial expressions) of a person who is lying
will exhibit emotion of stress characterized by the eyebrows being drawn upwards
towards the middle of the forehead. A micro expression is a momentary involuntary
facial expression that people unconsciously display when they are hiding an emotion.
They are quick and intense expressions of concealed emotion. A micro expression is
caused by involuntary movements in facial muscles. Most people cannot control these
involuntary muscles which are affected by their emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sad-
ness, happiness, surprise and contempt). Hence, people often try to cover the lie by
making certain gestures, covering their mouth, touching their nose, rubbing the eyes
and avoiding making any kind of eye contact, some people unconsciously pull their
collar, become nervous when they tell a lie. Timing is off between emotion gestures,
expressions and words. For example: Someone says, I love it! when receiving a gift,
and then smiles after making that statement, rather than at the same time the statement
is made.

Gestures don’t match the verbal statement, such as frowning when saying I love you.
But at the same time it should be stated that if someone exhibits one or more of these
signs it doesn’t mean that s/he is lying. The above behaviors should be compared to a per-
son’s normal behavior. The more you get to know someone, the better you will become
at knowing whether they may be straying from the truth.

What has been said above makes it possible to claim that gestures constitute one of the
non-verbal means of the expression of falsehood in speech. As it has already been mentioned
verbal expression too can give clues to whether a person is lying or not, for example:

a) Using/repeating your own exact words when answering a question (when asked,
Did you eat the last cookie? the liar answers, No, I did not eat the last cookie.).

b) Statement with a contraction is more likely to be truthful (I didn’t do it instead of
I did not do it.).

c) Avoiding direct statements or answers.
d) Speaking excessively in an effort to convince.
e) Speaking in a monotonous tone.
f) Leaving out pronouns.
g) Using humor to avoid a subject. 
Distancing language is phrasing used by people to “distance” themselves from a

statement, either to avoid thinking about the subject or to distance themselves from its
content. Distancing language is often a means of self-deception, but distancing language
used orally may indicate that a person is lying.

Examples of distancing language:

• Distancing clinical language partly shields health workers from the impact of work-
place experiences, e.g. bled to death substituted with exsanguinated. 

• Military personnel may use a range of distancing terms for combatants either killing
or getting killed. They may also employ distancing, dehumanizing terms for combat-
ants on the opposing side. Collateral damage for the death of uninvolved civilians is
an example. 

• Everyday euphemistic references to death, dying, burial, corpses and to the people

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and places which deal with death are also protective, distancing terms either formal
or informal, e.g. croaked, bought the farm, expired, passed on. 

• An indirect statement implying an answer, rather than a direct answer, may indicate
lying. For example, replies such as Would I do such a thing? or even I wouldn’t do
such a thing, rather than I didn’t do it. Referring to someone known well by the speak-
er as that woman instead of using a name or her is another example.

• It is also likely that liars will think that the use of speech hesitations and speech errors
sound dubious. Therefore, they will try to avoid making such liars’ voices and sound
tenser than true tellers’ voices. The result concerning speech errors (word/sentence
repetition, sentence change, sentence incompletion, slips of tongue and so on) and
speech hesitations (use of speech fillers such as ah, um, er ) show a conflicting pat-
tern (Scovel 1998:45).
Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that those who refrain from lying may do so only

because of the difficulty involved in maintaining the lie. This is consistent with his gen-
eral philosophy that divides people according to strength and ability; thus, some people
tell the truth only out of weakness.

Thus, deception among humans is not necessarily a bad thing, but is widely con-
demned when it hurts or has potential to harm people. Innocuous deception is practiced
by virtually everyone daily as a routine aspect of living. Managing the expressions of the
face, disguising its features, and enhancing its attributes are important aspects of decep-
tion whenever people meet face-to-face.

References:

1. Birdwhistell, R.L. (1970) Essays on Body Motion Communication. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

2. Carroll, R.; Prikett, S. (1997) The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford
World’s Classics. Oxford: OUP.

3. Ford, C.V. (2005) Lies! Lies! Lies! The Psychology of Deceit. Washington: American
Psychiatric Press, Inc. 

4. Garman, M. (1990) Psycholinguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
5. Granhag, A.; Strömwal, L.A. (2004): The Detection of Deception in Forensic

Contexts. Cambridge: CUP.
6. Hirschberg, J.; Benus, S. (2005) Distinguishing Deceptive from Non-Deceptive

Speech. Columbia: CUP.
7. Scovel, T. (1998) Psycholinguistics. Oxford: OUP.
8. Steinberg, D.D.; Scarini, N.V. (1993) An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. London:

Longman.
9. Tammer, D.C.; Tammer, M.E. (2004) Forensic Aspects of Speech Patterns, Voice

Prints, Speaker Profiling, Lie and Detection. Lawyers and Judges Publishing Co., Inc.

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