• Maillat Didier

In this seminar, we will investigate how pragmatics can help us understand some of the interpretative phenomena at work when someone tries to persuade us or to manipulate us. In doing so, we will analyse English data (e.g. political speeches, ads, propaganda, fake news, etc.) to see how a pragmatic theory of comprehension and argument evaluation explains the impact of some of the most well-known rhetorical figures and strategies.

Excerpts of historical, as well as contemporary English sources will be used as a source of data to describe and analyse the kind of processes triggered when a speaker tries to persuade or manipulate a hearer to include new or contradictory information to his/her knowledgebase.

Students will learn to recognise relevant features, and subsequently to analyse their effects on comprehension processes. The course will look at obvious figures of speech such as repetitions, metonymies, metaphors, euphemisms, litotes, irony, sound bites, etc.

In the course we will draw a parallel between pragmatics and cognitive psychology, in order to trace the cognitive underpinnings of the kind of effects that persuasive or manipulative discourse relies on.

• methodological and practical approach to carrying empirical research with linguistic data in English
• knowledge of the current relevant issues in the field
• critical evaluation of scientific papers
• theoretical and methodological tools used to investigate persuasion and manipulation in the English language

A bibliography and a list of assigned readings will be made available in the first week of the semester.