Language Log

Watch your pronouns and verbs!

The January 2008 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin contains an article by Special Agent Vincent Sandoval about the methods his agency uses and advocates to local law enforcement officers as they struggle to determine whether suspects are lying or telling the truth. What he wrote came as no shock to me because I've heard agents and consultants lecture about this in the past and I've read most of the sources from which they get their ideas. But on the remote possibility that Language Log readers are not regular subscribers to this journal, and in an effort to give you helpful  guidance if, for some reason, you should ever be interrogated by the police, I thought it might be a public service to pass along some of S.A. Sandoval's tidbits about how that agency can tell that you're lying by the way you use pronouns and verbs.

Your pronouns can indicate deception

Sandoval points out that in sexual assault cases, especially when the suspect alleges that the sexual contact was consensual, investigators should listen carefully for the absence of the pronoun, we. To illustrate, he offers one suspect's description of what happened after the sex act:

  The author points out that the suspect never used the pronoun, we, in his description and goes on to advise cops who read this article:

Okay, folks, repeat after me, "we got dressed," "we walked outside," "we said our good-byes," "we hugged," "we talked," and "we  walked home." Learn to say we when the law talks with you. Otherwise, you're being deceptive.

Not content with his helpful explanation of the absence of we, Sandoval goes further:

Your verbs also will give you away

He describes the principle of past action = past tense and announces:

Turning to the passive voice, Sandoval advises that suspects attempting to conceal or minimize the extent of their involvement say things like:

Language Log has had a few things to say about the good old passive voice. See  this post by Arnold Zwicky, for example. I've examined hundreds of police reports and FBI 302s over the years. And guess what? I find that the police use passives themselves all the time. Hmm.

I regret to inform you that these ideas are not new. Google locates over 100,000 sources about lying and deception, including programs and books by Mark McClish and Don Rabon that say pretty much these same things about pronouns and verbs. They and others (such as Avinoam Sapir) instruct law enforcement officers about these and other aspects of language and deception in the seminars they promote and sell around the country. Your tax money at work.