Cover not available

Article In: Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

From persuasion techniques to pragmatic mechanisms

Unpacking the language of propaganda in English

 | University of Oslo
 | The National Research University Higher School of EconomicsMoscow
ORCiD logo with link | University of Oslo | Norwegian Defence University CollegeLillehammer
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
In this study, we describe the language of persuasion in a specific type of fake news used to mislead people by often implicit means, namely, propaganda. In this way, propaganda lends itself well to a pragmatic analysis of the underlying mechanisms that are exploited to convince people to adopt a specific ideology or worldview. Our aim is to identify these pragmatic mechanisms, and the linguistic forms through which they are realized, in a systematic way using the Fakespeak-ENG corpus. We both draw on and add to an existing framework of persuasion by taking it as our starting point for identifying persuasion in the corpus texts and by adding to it another analytical layer that takes language more seriously. The results show that the most common persuasion techniques in our propaganda texts are Loaded Language, Appeal to Authority and Appeal to Time, which are characterized by negative sentiment words, reporting verbs and temporal deictic markers, respectively. In addition, we emphasize the manipulative use of figurative language, false implicatures and presuppositions, and typographic emphasis to convey persuasion in more or less subtle ways. Unpacking these linguistic strategies will add to existing work on the language of fake news in general and propaganda in particular and have real-world implications for automatic propaganda detection and media literacy education.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Propaganda and persuasion
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Corpus sample
    • 3.2Annotation of persuasion techniques
    • 3.3Pragmatic analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Occurrence of persuasion techniques
    • 4.2Pragmatic mechanisms associated with the techniques
      • 4.2.1Five most common sub-techniques
        • Loaded Language
        • Appeal to Authority
        • Appeal to Time
      • 4.2.2Other technique
  • 5.Concluding discussion
  • Note
  • References
References (49)
References
Apresjan, Valentina, and Alexander Orlov. 2022. “Pragmatic Mechanisms of Manipulation in Russian Online Media: How Clickbait Works (or Does Not).” Journal of Pragmatics 195: 91–108. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Asr, Fatemeh T., Mehrdad Mokhtari, and Maite Taboada. 2023. “Misinformation Detection in News Text: Automatic Methods and Data Limitations.” In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation, ed. by Stefania Maci, Massimiliano Demata, Mark McGlashan, and Philip Seargent, 79–102. London and New York, N.Y.: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2011. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Claridge, Claudia. 2018. “Lying, Metaphor, and Hyperbole.” In The Oxford Handbook of Lying, ed. by Jörg Meibauer, 370–381. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruse, Alan. 2004. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Da San Martino, Giovanni, Seunghak Yu, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Rostislav Petrov, and Preslav Nakov. 2019. “Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles.” In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), ed. by Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, and Xiaojun Wan, 5636–5646. Hong Kong: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dayter, Daria, and Sofia Rüdiger. 2025. “Persuasion and Influence in Linguistic Research.” In Manipulation, Influence and Deception: The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language, ed. by Sofia Rüdiger, and Daria Dayter, 3–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dayter, Daria, and Sofia Rüdiger. 2026. “Corpus Linguistics and Persuasion.” In International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd ed., ed. by Hilary Nesi, and Petar Milin, 497–501. Abingdon, UK: Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A., Marisol Velasco-Sacristán, Ascensión Arribas-Baño, and Eva Samaniego-Fernández. 2001. “Persuasion and Advertising English: Metadiscourse in Slogans and Headlines.” Journal of Pragmatics 33 (8): 1291–1307. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garassino, Davide, Viviana Masia, Nicola Brocca, and Alice Delorme Benites. 2024. “Politicians vs ChatGPT: A Study of Presuppositions in French and Italian Political Communication.” AI-Linguistica 1 (1): 1–26. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gass, Robert H., and John S. Seiter. 2022. Persuasion: Social Influence and Compliance Gaining. 7th ed. New York, N.Y.: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giora, Rachel, Shir Givoni, and Ofer Fein. 2015. “Defaultness Reigns: The Case of Sarcasm.” Metaphor & Symbol 30 (4): 290–313. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grice, Paul H. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York, N.Y.: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grieve, Jack, and Helena Woodfield. 2023. The Language of Fake News. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holan, Angie D. 2018. “The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter: PolitiFact’s Methodology for Independent Fact-Checking.” PolitiFact. [URL] Last accessed on August 24, 2026.
Inwood, Olivia, and Michele Zappavigna. 2023. “Attitudes about Propaganda and Disinformation: Identifying Discursive Personae in YouTube Comment Sections.” In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation, ed. by Stefania Maci, Massimiliano Demata, Mark McGlashan, and Philip Seargent, 239–257. London and New York, N.Y.: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jowett, Garth, and Victoria O’Donnell. 2012. Propaganda and Persuasion. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koteyko, Irina. 2015. “The Language of Press Advertising in the UK: A Multi-Dimensional Study.” Journal of English Linguistics 43 (4): 259–283. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuiken, Jeffrey, Anne Schuth, Martijn Spitters, and Maarten Marx. 2017. “Effective Headlines of Newspaper Articles in a Digital Environment.” Digital Journalism 5 (10): 1300–1314. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, Robin. 1982. “Persuasive Discourse and Ordinary Conversation, with Examples from Advertising.” In Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 25–42. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liu, Dilin, and Lei Lei. 2018. “The Appeal to Political Sentiment: An Analysis of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s Speech Themes and Discourse Strategies in the 2016 US Presidential Election.” Discourse, Context & Media 25: 143–152. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maia, Jefferson. 2018. Towards a Typographical Linguistics: The Semantics-Pragmatics of Typographic Emphasis in Discourse. PhD diss., University of South Carolina. [URL]
Markowitz, David M., and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2014. “Linguistic Traces of a Scientific Fraud: The Case of Diederik Stapel.” PLOS ONE 9 (8): 1–5. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martin, James R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mazzarella, Diana, Robert Reinecke, Ira Noveck, and Hugo Mercier. 2018. “Saying, Presupposing and Implicating: How Pragmatics Modulates Commitment.” Journal of Pragmatics 133: 15–27. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McGlashan, Mark, Isobelle Clarke, Matt Gee, Tatiana Grieshofer, Andrew Kehoe, and Robert Lawson. 2025. “COVID-19 Vaccine Conspiracy Theories, Discourses of Liberty, and “the New Normal” on Social Media.” Linguistics Vanguard. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mekelburg, Madlin. 2020. “Recovery Data on Coronavirus is Lacking.” PolitiFact. [URL] Last accessed on August 24, 2026.
Németh, Enikő, Zsuzsanna Németh, and Katalin Nagy. 2025. “Implicit Pragmatic Phenomena in Headlines of Hungarian Health-Related Fake News.” Linguistics Vanguard. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Donnell, Mick. 2008. “Demonstration of the UAM CorpusTool for Text and Image Annotation.” In Proceedings of the ACL-08: HLT Demo Session, ed. by Jimmy Lin, 13–16. Columbus, Ohio: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Partington, Alan, and Charlotte Taylor. 2018. The Language of Persuasion in Politics: An Introduction. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pérez-Rosas, Verónica, Bennett Kleinberg, Alexandra Lefevre, and Rada Mihalcea. 2018. “Automatic Detection of Fake News.” In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, ed. by Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, and Pierre Isabelle, 3391–3401. Santa Fe, N.M.: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Piskorski, Jakub, Nicolas Stefanovitch, Valerie-Anne Bausiers, Nicolo Faggiani, Jens Linge, Sopho Karazi, Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Giulia Teodor, Bertrand De Longueville, Brian Doherty, Jason Gonin, Camelia Ignat, Bonka Kotseva, Eleonora Mantica, Lorena Marcaletti, Enrico Rossi, Alessio Spadaro, Marco Verile, Giovanni Da San Martino, Firoj Alam, and Preslav Nakov. 2023. News Categorization, Framing and Persuasion Techniques: Annotation Guidelines. JRC Technical Report. European Commission. [URL]
Põldvere, Nele, Elizaveta Kibisova, and Silje Susanne Alvestad. 2023. “Investigating the Language of Fake News across Cultures.” In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation, ed. by Stefania Maci, Massimiliano Demata, Mark McGlashan, and Philip Seargent, 153–165. London and New York, N.Y.: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Põldvere, Nele, Zia Uddin, and Aleena Thomas. 2023. “The PolitiFact-Oslo Corpus: A New Dataset for Fake News Analysis and Detection.” Information 14 (12): 627. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2024. “Out of Balance, Out of Sight: Issues with the Design and Accessibility of a Corpus of Fake and Real News.” Paper presented at the 45th Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, Vigo, Spain.
Pratkanis, Anthony, and Elliot Aronson. 1992. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. New York, N.Y.: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas. 2003. “Changes in the Modals and Semi-Modals of Strong Obligation and Epistemic Necessity in Recent British English.” In Modality in Contemporary English, ed. by Roberta Facchinetti, Frank Palmer, and Manfred Krug, 241–266. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tandoc, Edson C., Jr., Zheng Wei Lim, and Richard Ling. 2018. “Defining Fake News: A Typology of Scholarly Definitions.” Digital Journalism 6 (2): 137–153. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tian, Emily. 2021. “Proximity Monitors at Wash. School Are for Vaccinated Students and Staff, Too.” PolitiFact. [URL] Last accessed on August 24, 2026.
Traugott, Elizabeth C., and Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trnavac, Radoslava, Debopam Das, and Maite Taboada. 2016. “Discourse Relations and Evaluation.” Corpora 11 (2): 169–190. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trnavac, Radoslava, and Nele Põldvere. 2024. “Investigating Appraisal and the Language of Evaluation in Fake News Corpora.” Corpus Pragmatics 8: 107–130. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Van der Sandt, Rob A. 1992. “Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution.” Journal of Semantics 9 (4): 333–377. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
VERBI Software. 2023. MAXQDA 2022 (Version 2023). Berlin: VERBI Software. [URL]
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold-dark jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold-light jbe-platform.quadraat-sans-bold prag Twitter_Logo_Blue