2020 l The Art of the Lie : How the Manipulation of Language Affects Our Mind (original) (raw)
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The Pragmatics of Deception in American Presidential Electoral Speeches
International Journal of English Linguistics, 2017
Language is used for influencing people. Various means, whether honest or dishonest, are appealed to for achieving this purpose. This means that people fulfill their goals either through telling their interlocutors the truth or through deceiving and misleading them. In this regard, deception is a key aspect of many strategic interactions including bargaining, military operations, and politics. However, in spite of the importance of this topic, it has not been pragmatically given enough research attention particularly in politics. Thus, this study sets itself the task of dealing with this issue in this genre from a pragmatic perspective. Precisely, the current work attempts to answer the following question: What is the pragmatics of deception in American presidential electoral speeches? Pragmatics, here, involves the speech acts used to issue deceptive utterances, deceptive strategies resulting in the violation of Grice's maxims, as well as cognitive strategies.In other words, th...
The form and design of United States President Donald Trump's rhetorical ploys and positioning
This study explores the rhetorical ploys that President Donald Trump employed across selected rallies and State of the Union Addresses in 2018 and 2019. The analyses illuminate how adroitly Trump positions himself enlisting various persona (e.g., advocate, protector, victim and savior) as he orchestrates people, ideas and symbols to resonate with and fortify his following. In so doing, the study builds upon the previous efforts of sociolinguists, communication theorists, investigative journalists and political scientists who have explored Trump's tweets and speeches-especially, how Trump situates ideas, himself and his audiences including the antecedents to his pronouncements from warrants and claims to attacks on critics and opponents to testimonials and identification by association.
Language in Focus: Contemporary Means and Methods in ELT and Applied Linguistics , 2019
In communication, meanings are sometimes generated from unsaid utterances. Figuring out what is meant by an utterance depends not only on what is literally expressed but also on some implied messages or hints behind words. This was explained by the Implicature Theory, which distinguishes what is expressed literally from what is implied by the same utterance. This study is interested in the relation between language and political discourse. It tries to explore the conversational implicatures in the U.S. President Donald Trump's interview with "Face the Nation" show by John Dickerson, correspondent of CBS News, on April 30, 2017. It attempts to identify the implicatures in the interview’s transcript and to shed light on how non-observance of Grice’s maxims serves political discourse. Following the theoretical frameworks of conversational implicature and the Relevance Theory, the results showed that nonobservance of the maxims occurred by flouting, opting out and violating; the most flouted maxim was the maxim of quantity. As a result, conversational implicatures were derived in five out of seven analyzed texts and were used by Trump as a linguistic strategy in order to convey implied messages through giving long unclear tentative answers and that nonobservance of the maxims did not always lead to implicatures.
Donald Trump: the Liar in Chief
An analysis of the role played by lies in this US 2016 electoral campaign. By starting from the Hannah Arendt’s essay Lying in Politics (1972), the investigation goes through the main features, characteristics and relations between lies and politics; then, the figure of Donald Trump is depicted: not only his public speeches, but also how Trump has continuously recursed to a distortion of the reality, together with the invasion of “fake news” through all social networks; finally the question on whether the manipulation of the reality really influenced the final electoral outcome.