Strategies of Manipulation in Political Discourse

Abstract

The concept of manipulation will be seen as `making people behave in certain way without their knowing why, and perhaps even against their best interests and wishes` (J. Mey: 1993)1, and furthermore, how this linguistic power triggers certain effects in the minds of the audience based on different political ideologies. For the content of this paper I have chosen not to deal with manipulation on different levels (grammatical, morphological or syntactical) as this needs much more attention than I could provide within the limits of this paper, but to deal with manipulation on a larger scale (as a general concept) and its applicability to the political discourse. The issues will be treated from the linguistic point of view, given the fact that the language plays the decisive role in the process of manipulation and that `words` become more than just an abstract representation of the facts.