The idea that manipulation relies more heavily on implicit than on explicit communication has been the plank of several earlier and recent debates on argumentation and speaker roles in interactions. The present contribution will inquire into the selective nature of the use of implicit… read more
This article addresses, experimentally, the question of how presuppositions are cognitively processed and retrieved in discourse. In the proposed research, we have administered tweets produced by Italian politicians to native speakers so as to assess how easily they could retrieve the… read more
Asymmetries in topic-focus marking have extensively been discussed in recent typological contention, with a view to finding an interlinguistically viable definition of information structure units (Lazard 1994, Zimmermann & Onea 2011, Matić & Wedgwood 2013). In this paper I will address Zimmermann &… read more
Indirect speech is a remarkable trait of human communication. The present paper tackles the sociobiological underpinnings of communicative indirectness discussing both socio-interactional and cognitive rationales behind its manifestation in discourse. From a social perspective, the use of… read more