Article published in:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 6:4 (2015) ► pp. 502–516

Manipulation by deliberate failure of communication

This work studies manipulative use of language that can be called “deliberate failure of communication”; I characterize this kind of manipulation and show that it can be found in the discourse of marketing experts and legal professionals. Relying on relevance theory, I show that manipulation of this kind takes advantage of what van Dijk calls the “context model” of the addressees. I exemplify two ways in which the context models of some of the discourse’s participants might be misused in order to manipulate them. One way is exemplified by a text from an advertisement, the other by a text from a criminal court file. I propose, finally, that the analysis supports van Dijk’s view that social, discursive, and epistemic inequalities reproduce one another in a kind of vicious circle. It suggests, in van Dijk’s terms, that manipulation by deliberate failure of communication is a discriminatory use of language employed by elite groups in order to reproduce their social power.
Keywords: manipulative discourse, context models, unspoken assumptions, Relevance Theory, legal discourse, communication failure
Published online: 21 December 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.6.4.02azu
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Azuelos-Atias, Sol
2016. Identifying the meanings hidden in legal texts: The three conditions of relevance theory and their sufficiency. Semiotica 2016:209 ► pp. 99 ff. Crossref logo
Azuelos-Atias, Sol & Ning Ye
2017. On drafting, interpreting, and translating legal texts across languages and cultures . International Journal of Legal Discourse 2:1 ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo

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