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114 Deception at Work

THE SYNTAX

General

The construction of sentences is mainly unconscious and based on the person’s unique com-
munications code and may be incongruent with the content of a freestyle story or an answer
to an open question.

Sentence construction

The construction of sentences may be stilted, excessively short or rambling. They may also be
deliberately ambiguous, riddled with subjective truths or incomplete.

OJ SIMPSON AND HIS ALIBI

In explaining what he had done on the night wife] … went and got a burger, and I’d come
his wife was murdered, OJ Simpson said: home and kind of leisurely got ready to go. I
‘Eight-something, maybe. He hadn’t done a mean, we’d done a few things.’
jacuzzi, we had … [unfinished sentence but
probably referring to a discussion about his Note also the mixture of and missing
personal pronouns.

Often an incomplete sentence, or changes in content or syntax midway through a sen-
tence, result from severe editing and are indicative of deception.

With the brain in a thrashing mode a liar may use esoteric words such as ‘I am positively
asserting that I can exculpate myself from this abhorrent predicament’. Such phrasing is a sign of
severe editing – a deviation from his communication code – and deceptive unless, of course,
the subject is an estate agent, when any language is possible.

In another part of OJ’s interview he says the following:

OJ SIMPSON the time he ‘recalled’ the bleeding and left
the house. Also the missing pronoun ‘I’
‘I recall bleeding at my house. The last thing I before ‘went and got’ and the change from
did before I left, when I was rushing, was […] past to present tense may also be significant.
went and got my phone out of the Bronco.’ The statement is unlikely to be true.

The phrase ‘The last thing’ suggests that
something important was omitted between

Statements such as the above, and especially changes in tense, should be carefully analysed
for their real meaning. But please remember the analysis proves nothing. It is only of any value
if you consciously deal with it and it leads to other evidence, admissions and confessions.

In written stories, especially, punctuation can reveal important clues. Direct speech, re-
ported within inverted commas, is normally a sign of commitment and is more likely to be
true than not. However, if you are a follower of the comedian Billy Connolly, you will have
seen him use hand signals to indicate inverted commas in parts of his speech. Liars do the
same. So if someone says, ‘ I spoke to my wife’ and signals inverted commas when saying ‘wife’
you know something is amiss.