Politics, religion, and drama: Exploring the metapragmatics of hypocrisy

This chapter explores the metapragmatics of hypocrisy by taking a corpus-based approach to analysis. Specifically, the paper focuses on examining which social actors are labelled as hypocrites, what situations accusations of hypocrisy tend to occur in, and how language is used to construct people’s understanding of what hypocrisy is. To achieve this, instances of the lemma hypocrisy are examined within the Times Online 2000s corpus. Collocation analysis is used to explore the discourses in which the lemma is found, and as a result six broad categories are identified: social actors; religion and morality; society, social issues and justice; class system; drama; and metaphors. Exploration of these collocates and their respective concordance lines helps to further the understanding of this complex phenomenon, and it goes some way towards bridging the gap between traditional deception theory stemming from social psychology, and more recent empirical work within pragmatics.