On the grammar of scam: transitivity, manipulation and deception in scam emails

Abstract

This study examines the language of scam, focusing on one key lexicogrammatical system for representing experience, the system of transitivity. The study is informed by systemic functional linguistics theory and is based on a clause-by-clause analysis of forty scam email messages, comprising 860 clauses. The frequency distribution of process types shows that scammers mimic the everyday taken-for-granted construction of experience in discourse in producing scam, thereby concealing the motive of the scammer. Second, scammers favor three sub-types of material processes, namely communication-oriented clauses, clauses of transfer of possession and use-oriented clauses. In addition, scam emails are shown to be interpersonally rich in the use of personal pronouns to index and position scammers relative to their target email recipients in manipulative ways. Also, the possessive determiners my, your and our are used in nominal groups functioning as participants to position the scammer and target recipients differently. Notably, the pronoun my (representing the scammer) normally collocates with social relationship/kinship terms or a noun denoting the condition of the scammer, your (representing the recipient) collocates with nouns denoting material possessions or semiotic activities, while our often collocates with nouns that evoke some institutional commitment, locating the scammer within a network of relations.