Telling it like it isn ’ t – a comprehensive approach to analyzing verbal deception 1

Verbal deception is everywhere—in interpersonal relationships, in politics, in advertising, and in courts of law. In all of these, and in many other domains, we often find people “telling it like it isn’t.” This chapter is concerned with understanding what this seemingly simple idea really means. Much work has been done in several fields (e.g., communication studies, philosophy, linguistics) and on various aspects of verbal deception, but nowhere is there a comprehensive integration of the different views and observations that are to be found in the literature. In this chapter, we attempt to pull together the multifarious strands by proposing two taxonomies of verbal deception—one pertaining to verbal deception types and one to verbal deception strategies.