A Pragmatic Study of Manipulation: A Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

Generally, language effectively influences people’s opinions and activities. This means that coding a message is not the final aim of interaction. Rather, it intends to achieve other ends directed at controlling interlocutor’s activities, i.e. to manipulate targets. Manipulation becomes one of the worldwide phenomena nowadays in various aspects of life as well as a relatively new trend of study in the framework of pragmatics. This motivates this paper to investigate this phenomenon. Strictly speaking, it is tackled from theoretical pragmatic perspective. As such, it aims at finding out the nature of manipulation, its main lineaments and the pragmatic strategies of performing it in an attempt to develop a model of analyzing this phenomenon. It hypothesizes that manipulation can be best seen as a pragmatic product which results from certain pragmatic strategies. The study has come with some conclusions that indicate the hypothesis of the study