Implicit Manipulation in Public Discourse: Quantitative and Qualitative approaches
Short Title: IMPAQTS

Date: 27-Apr-2023 - 28-Apr-2023
Location: Roma Tre University (Rome), Italy
Contact: Viviana Masia
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://oppp.it/evento/international-conference-implicit-manipulation-in-public-discourse-quantitative-and-qualitative-approaches-2/

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Neurolinguistics; Pragmatics

Meeting Description:

The aim of this conference is to promote a discussion about the impact of linguistic implicit communication on human cognition, with particular reference to public discourse. The conference is organized as a conclusive event of the project IMPAQTS Implicit Manipulation in Politics: Quantitatively Assessing the tendentiousness of Speeches (funded by the Italian Government as the Project of Relevant National Interest 2017, n. 2017STJCE9 – https://impaqts.it).

In persuasive discourse, the boundary between communication and manipulation is not always easily traced. The aim of political and commercial propaganda is to mold peoples’ behaviors: this is often obtained through underencoded or implicit contents (Ducrot 1972; Sbisà 2007), whose cognitive processing is different from that of explicit contents. More specifically, linguistic implicit strategies have evolved as a part of human communication and of speakers’ widespread tendency to manipulate others (Mercier 2009, Sperber et al. 2010, Reboul 2011, Lombardi Vallauri 2019, 2021, building on Krebs & Dawkins 1984). The role of implicit strategies in manipulation has also been investigated within the theoretical frames of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and argumentation theory (van Dijk 1992, 1997, 2000, 2011; Chilton 2005; Danler 2005; Rocci 2005; Charaudeau 2005; Reisigl 2008).

An important part of the studies on linguistic implicitness have proposed taxonomies and methods aimed at classifying implicit persuasive strategies and at quantifying their impact in texts (Lombardi Vallauri & Masia, 2014; Lombardi Vallauri, 2016b; 2019; Müller, 2017; Garassino et al., 2019). The linguistic strategies normally considered in such taxonomies include: presuppositions (see a.o. Strawson ; Sellars 1954; Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970; Karttunen 1971, 1973; Fillmore 1971; Levinson 1983; Fox & Thompson 1990; Stalnaker 2002, de Saussure 2012, Macagno 2022), different kinds of implicatures (see a.o. Grice 1975, Levinson 1983, Sperber & Wilson 1986, Sbisà 2007), vagueness (see Channell 1985, 1994; Cutting 2007; Brown & Levinson 1987; Overstreet & Yule 1997; Jucker et al. 2003; Cotterill 2007; Koester 2007; Lombardi Vallauri 2016a, 2019) and topicalizations (see Cresti 2000, Lombardi Vallauri 2009).

Another aspect relevant for our understanding of linguistic implicitness regards the collection of large amounts of authentic data. An important step in this direction has been made within the IMPAQTS project itself, which has allowed the collection of a large corpus of Italian political speeches thoroughly annotated per implicitly conveyed non bona fide true contents (Cominetti et al. in press).

In newly emerging lines of research, implicit strategies have also been experimentally investigated, with both behavioral and neurophysiological techniques. Notably, much work has been devoted to assessing the processing underpinnings of presupposed contents, with interesting findings on the differences between trigger types (Schwarz 2015; Masia et al. 2017, Domaneschi et al. 2018), which reveal that different presupposing constructions may induce as much different mental representations of discourse contents, which affect the likelihood with which receivers may challenge those contents in an interaction. Behavioral and neurophysiological experimentations on implicatures have shed light on extra mental resources involved in computing inferential meanings (Noveck & Posada 2003, Pouscoulous et al. 2007, Cory et al. 2014, Bašnáková et al. 2014), which marks them as involving different mental processes than those required to disentangle presupposed information. Other studies have also sought to test the effects of plausible deniability of implicit contents, namely the possibility that a speaker has to deny having conveyed certain content without bringing about contradictory communicative moves.