A Relevance-theoretic Approach To Pragmatic Manipulation

Manipulation is a phenomenon occurring frequently in verbal communication,which should be attached great importance to.There is little literature on manipulation at home,leaving much room for exploration of this phenomenon.The latest studies of manipulation focus on the cognitive interpretation of manipulative discourse based on relevance theory.As human communication involves cognition,the cognitive pragmatics approach to manipulation should receive more attention.Manipulation in this thesis is defined as an attempt on the part of the speaker to intentionally alter the status of the information to make the hearer do something beneficial to the speaker.Since communicators in conflict talks usually exploit different strategies to maintain their own positions and achieve certain goals,there exist many manipulation cases in conflict talks.With the framework of relevance theory and the CSC model proposed by Maillat and Oswald(2009;2011),as well as the data collected from the classic TV series Golden Wedding,the present study aims to explore the strategies and interpretation process of manipulation in conflict talks from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics.Three questions are to be addressed in the study:(1)What role does manipulation play in conflict talks between the couple in Golden Wedding?(2)What are the manipulative strategies used by the couple?(3)How does the manipulator/speaker affect the hearer’s interpretation of manipulative utterances in Golden Wedding?Through the case analysis,the present study finds that(i)manipulation in conflict talks works as a constraining device which influences the context selection process of the hearer in his/her cognitive environment;(ii)The constraints imposed on the hearer’s cognitive environment are realized by three broad manipulative strategies,that is,there are three broad manipulative strategies used by the couple in Golden Wedding,namely,strengthening the accessibility of context C,weakening the accessibility of context C’ and strengthening C while weakening C’,subsuming six sub-strategies such as topicalization,repetition,using fallacies,detopicalization,quoting out of context and negation.These strategies are used to make some contextual assumptions more salient or less salient;(iii)The cognitive mechanism for interpretation of manipulation in conflict talks works as follows: it follows the standard contextual selection of the relevance-guided comprehension procedure,but,due to the manipulative strategies used,the accessibility or saliency of the contextual assumptions in the hearer’s cognitive environment is altered;as predicted by RT,contextual selection privileges the most accessible assumptions,that is,the more salient an assumption is,the more likely it will be selected,such that the hearer ends up being manipulated into selecting the assumption(s)which is(are)most accessible to the hearer but more to the manipulator’s advantage.