Overview

The book presents an integrated model of vagueness as an implicit and persuasive strategy, pervasive in everyday language use and public discourse. It considers three macro-dimensions of the phenomenon: linguistic-theoretical, psychological, and social-discursive. It shows how vagueness can be strategically employed to elude recipients’ critical evaluation of intended contents, to deresponsibilize the source and make their arguments unchallengeable. It explores the semiotic, semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic nature of vagueness, and looks at its use in contemporary public (with a focus on Italian) discourse. It also delves into under-explored aspects of the phenomenon such as: the continuum of intentionality in the use of vague expressions; the evolutionary significance of vagueness; its implicitating and persuasive functions; the phenomenon of vagueness by implicature; the interaction between vague expressions and context precisation; the cognitive functioning of vague expressions; the use of vagueness in contemporary persuasive vs. non-persuasive text types; gender-based differences in the use of vagueness in public discourse.

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9789027219138

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Reviews

Vagueness as an Implicitating Persuasive Strategy is an original and promising volume written by Giorgia Mannaioli (University of Genoa) on the manipulative character of the use of vagueness in verbal language. [...] With this work, Mannaioli has inaugurated an important strand of empirical and text-based studies on vagueness by presenting them as two mutually integrable and, to a certain extent, interacting perspectives, as the experimental data on the processing of vague expressions allows us to account for the reasons underlying certain uses of vagueness and how these can impact the general understanding of a text. In conclusion, this volume is part of a scientific panorama of studies in philosophy of language, experimental pragmatics and discourse analysis, among many others, with which it dialogues in an excellent and meritorious way. It thus constitutes a remarkable advance in the study of vague language and how it can be used to influence others. In short, an unusual light in the dark and insidious forest of linguistic manipulation. -- Viviana Masia, Roma Tre University, in Journal of Argumentation in Context 14:2 (2025).

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