Manipulation in Discourse

Can heroes, that one comes to idealise over years, actually be evil? Are discourses around their extraordinary courage created to hide their ordinary degeneracy? Moreover, is it their 'natural' human nature that is capable of both good and evil, at fault? Or is it the far more sinister impulse to categorise them as either of these two facets of man's personality that is responsible? These are some of the questions that the paper would aim at answering by studying how false discourses around matters of 'heroism' and 'heroes' are produced which are then further propounded in order to hide the

The present research study delves into the possible reasons the
scriptwriter of the series Doctor Who (2005) attempted to include
atemporal items of vocabulary in the episode “The Shakespeare Code”
(2007), shedding light on the possibilities of considering this TV series as
a source for learning about the historical development of language. The
changes that English went through throughout time are clearly seen in
the different episodes, where the Doctor adapts his language to that of
past times, being careful not to present something from the future in the
past.

Language adaptation and specific mise-en-scene are developed in its
episodes with such attention to detail that it becomes an interesting point
of departure for the discussion of the historical and literary events
presented. TV series creators, without considering their products as
learning materials, provide teachers with important sources to work with.

Based on the theories of Roland Barthes on the five codes of language
and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, this dissertation aims to
explain the chronotopical insertion of vocabulary and the use of specific
misé-en-scene to give insights into the importance of analysing
chronotopes in the English language classroom. The analysis and
definition of the different chronotopes provides insights on the way the

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scriptwriter manipulates discourse to portray different power relations in
the series.

By researching the relationship of the different chronotopes present in
the scene, it became evident that there is a need of deep analysis of the
materials used in language classroom to provide students with better
tools to acquire the language, given the different learning needs of
participants. From the careful selection of mise-en-scène to the right
choice of vocabulary on the part of scriptwriters, together with the
carefully portrayed characters, viewers can easily understand each
character’s role at each moment in the episode. The different
chronotopes analysed provide an interesting point of view of
Shakespearean times, at the same time that viewers create their own
atmosphere from the series. Discourse manipulation helps the creation
of the different chronotopes, which, in turn, viewers understand as
different parts of a unique whole - the episode. All together, they create
the meaning and atmosphere the scriptwriter wanted to transmit in the
episode.

Furthermore, technical elements such as camera shots and angles,
lighting changes and misé-en-scene were examined to explain the
purpose for each element to be present in the scene.

This can be a useful resource for teachers’ practices so as to enhance
students’ understanding of language changes throughout times. The
episode would then serve as a useful tool to aid the teaching of language
and culture of English, with a clear focus on language development.

Key words
chronotope – language code – discourse manipulation - power relations - technical elements

Howard Gruber, a founder member of Psychologists for Social Action, reviewed the dissertation. His review, dated May 7, 1978, as Parkovnick (2015) points out, "... is worth quoting in full, as it captures the very essence of the dissertation":
“This is an effective dissertation and could become an important book. I began reading it very favorably disposed to it. Then I got more and more riled up, made many hostile notes. By the end I found myself almost won over, certainly illuminated. Francks [Gruber’s spelling] has a style that gets under your skin and stays there. This is a good thing and should not get lost in the process of expansion, rewriting, and editing. It will take some work to make it a persuasive book to a less sympathetic reader, and to reduce its present excessive vulnerability to academic criticism. Its very sweep opens many avenues to criticism, crit. of a kind that detracts the reader and potential reader from the central ideas. But all this can be worked out. As an academic type, I often find myself cringing, wanting things toned down. But by the time I finished, I felt that the direction of the change should be to strengthen the tone of the book, to make its central, disturbing message more apparent, bring it more up front.”  Gruber, H. (1978). Review of A history of American social psychology up to the Second World War by Peter Francks [Gruber’s spelling] for Ablex Publishing Corporation, May 7.

Readers should also look at: https://www.academia.edu/60033912/The_Psychology_of_Participation_Revisited_1984_2021

Oversupply of information, irrelevance, and repetition in political and administrative text and talk have received considerable scholarly attention, but the tendency to date has been to analyse these phenomena separately. In this article, I argue that it would be fruitful to explore these aspects in combination, as constitutive dimensions of calculated overcommunicative behaviour in public administration.

Based on a multidisciplinary review of literature on cognitive manipulation, prolixity, (ir)relevance, discourse repetition, and administrative behaviour, I propose an original ‘overcommunication framework’ for explicating certain discursive macro-strategies of positive self-presentation used by public officeholders. In particular, I discuss how governments may use calculated overcommunication to avoid or deflect blame, to signal democratic openness, and to perform swiftness.

By problematising the notion of ‘overcommunication’ and introducing it into discourse studies, I seek to open up new avenues of understanding and investigating political and organisational communication.

El artículo es una investigación fomentada como asignación de la cátedra “Teoría de laComunicación” del Máster en Comunicación Social de la Universidad de Almería, bajo la
tutela del profesor Jesús Baca Martín y que servirá de fundamento teórico para el tema de tesisdoctoral del autor. El trabajo da una mirada a la actual sociedad como víctima propiciatoria desu propia desinformación. Asimismo pone en manifiesto y evidencia el manejo de los medios ydel mensaje como elementos existenciales para una manipulación efectiva.

The present article is an investigation based on an assignation
of the subject “Theories of Communication”
included on the syllabus of the Master in Social Communication of AlmeriaUniversity, under the revision of Professor Jesús Baca Martin and will be the theoricalfundament for the doctoral thesis of the author. This work takes a look to the actual society as avictim, but also as a victimary, about its own disinformation. Also looks around the media´smessage tergiversation as a fundament for an effective manipulation

Riassunto. Questo studio nasce da una questione di natura imagologica: l’immagine dei turchi in generale e in particolare il modo in cui il
film Fuga di mezzanotte viene recensito e veicolato da critica e stampa italiane, hanno favorito la diffusione di numerosi fraintendimenti
e difficoltà di comprensione tra le culture occidentali e in particolare la cultura italiana e quella turca. Lo scopo di questa indagine è di
individuare quali siano gli elementi presenti nel film e nella critica e stampa italiane responsabili di una tale lettura distorta della realtà turca
ed analizzarne le motivazioni. Il lavoro è di ambito generale e non ha la pretesa di costituire una rassegna esauriente della tematica presa in
considerazione. Metodologicamente, lo studio si basa su una analisi di secondo livello. I risultati della ricerca mettono in evidenza che
secondo alcuni critici il film Fuga di mezzanotte ha contribuito a generare nell’immaginario culturale occidentale ed in particolare in quello
italiano l’idea che la Turchia sia un paese pericoloso, dove persone innocenti vengono arbitrariamente arrestate, processate e condannate,
mentre i turchi sono dei barbari da temere ed odiare. Altri adottano invece un approccio più critico nell’analisi della pellicola, affermando
che i turchi rappresentati nel film non sono altro che personaggi dalla valenza caricaturale, degni di un fumetto, perché la sceneggiatura,
priva di qualsiasi senso reale, imbastisce varie situazioni del tutto inventate che limitano gli orizzonti, confermano le paure e i pregiudizi
degli spettatori, alimentandone al contempo i risentimenti più miseri. In ultima analisi, emerge il fatto che il regista di Fuga di mezzanotte
non è interessato alla realtà turca e anche le poche volte in cui vi si sofferma tende a favorire un approccio filtrato e frutto di manipolazione.

Abstract. The starting point of this study was the recognition of a problem related to imagology: the Turkish images generally, and the
Italian press’ reception of the film Midnight Express particularly, appear to have had considerable potential to foster mutual incomprehension
between Italians and Turks. The purpose of the paper is to indicate how and why this film, and the discourse about it, posed such an obstacle
to intercultural understanding. The paper does not claim to cover all aspects of the issue under investigation but offers an introductory
survey. In terms of methodology, it is a secondary analysis. The findings of the study reveal that, according to some reviewers, Midnight
Express depicts Turkey as a dangerous country where innocent people are arrested, put on trial and condemned; the film even suggests that
Turks are barbarians who deserve to be hated. Other reviewers offer a more critical view of the film, arguing that the Turks in it are little
more than cartoon-like characters, that the screenplay of the film is often entirely unreal, and that the film’s various made-up scenes serve
purely to narrow the horizons of viewers, confirming their fears, prejudices and resentments. In the final analysis, the reality of Turkey seems
to be of little interest to the director of Midnigt Express, who presents a filtered image of this reality, preserving only those elements that are
useful for him; the image of Turkey is always the result of a manipulation in the film.

There has been a certain amount of prominent research concentrated on the technologization of discourse. On consideration of the recent conclusions on technologization, I suggest that the angle of research should be altered to focus on defining the linguistic nature of technologization, the levels (or steps) this procedure implies, and its main source. The nexus between technologization, manipulation and simulacra has not yet been acknowledged and proved. Technologization has also not been related to the elimination of the subject from the postmodernistic discourse. Using examples from the political discourse of G. W. Bush, the following article pertains to the validity of such claims.

Governments’ policies and actions often precipitate public blame firestorms and mediated scandals targeted at individual or collective policy makers. In the face of losing credibility and resources, officeholders are tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations and language use.

Linguistic aspects of blame avoidance are yet to be studied by discourse analysts in great detail. In this article, I contribute to filling this gap in knowledge by proposing an improved heuristic for understanding typical macroconversational discursive practices adopted by officeholders in the circumstances of blame risk to achieve the goal of positive self-presentation.

Based on a multidisciplinary review of scholarly literature, I show how personal and institutional risk aversion involves the application of certain strategies of argumentation, framing, denial, social actor and action representation, legitimation and manipulation. I use concrete textual examples from public statements of UK government officeholders to illustrate how blame avoidance works at the highest level of administration.

I argue that to understand blame avoidance as a dominant recurring theme in public communication we should look beyond current linguistic approaches to conflict talk. This could lead to the application of new useful analytic tools within discourse studies and open new avenues of critical research into language use in politics and bureaucratic organisations.

In her foundational political treatise, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt notes that deception is an essential component in the development and maintenance of totalitarian rule. 1 This deceit is made necessary by the regime's simultaneous need to hide the truth of its activities from its subjects, as well as from the non-totalitarian world of which it is a part. In order to accomplish this, the totalitarian state relies on a combination of secrecy, surveillance, and propaganda in order to produce a world of fiction so as to placate the masses under their control, and to avoid provoking the suspicion of outside actors. Although the speeches, imagery, and state documents of the Third Reich have been the subject of a great deal of scholarly scrutiny, the language used by the National Socialist Party -what is now known as Nazi-Deutsch -has received comparatively little attention. 2 However, it was primarily through the use of this language, which flourished in both the public and private spheres of German discourse, that the Nazis sought to achieve their goal of complete ideological domination. This discursive manipulation not only sought to divorce the German people from the reality that they were experiencing, but also aimed to produce a body of subjects that were at once both fanatical and docile, unthinking and yet unquestioningly obedient.

Un día, cuando su grupo-compromiso considera que se reunen ciertas condiciones domésticas e internacionales, el Presidente de un país transmite masivamente un mensaje a sus gobernados.  Lo hace, típicamente en cadena nacional y a la hora de mayor rating televisivo.  Con la solemnidad que amerita la ocasión, ahí anuncia que se aparta, desde ese momento y durante un periodo indeterminado de tiempo, de la legalidad hasta entónces vigente.  Dá a conocer que suprime a los otros dos poderes (legislativo y judicial), y que declara abolido el órden constitucional conforme al cuál él mísmo tuvo acceso a la silla presidencial.  Aunque nunca lo llama de esta manera, en realidad proclama que, a partir de ese instante, está llevando a cabo lo que en las ciencias sociales se conoce hoy en día como un autogolpe de estado.
¿Cómo se conceptualiza, un autogolpe de Estado? ¿Qué es lo que sucede antes, durante y despues del autogolpe?  ¿Cuáles son las fases y etapas, por los que pasa un autogolpe de Estado?  ¿Cuándo es, desde la perspectiva del grupo que prepara un autogolpe, el momento preciso para darlo? ¿Cuáles son los elementos del discurso presidencial que se emplea y difunde, cuando empieza a ejercer la titularidad del Ejecutivo, luego de su primer triunfo electoral?  ¿Qué argumentación emplea públicamente el presidente autogolplista, para justificarlo, en el momento en que lo está dando? 
El cometido del presente documento estriba en iniciar la construcción de una teoría de alcance intermedio que, con fundamento en la literatura académica existente a nivel mundial al principiar el año 2002, responda a las interrogantes planteadas.  Concretamente, en él se exponen los resultados de un proyecto de investigación orientado a identificar y caracterizar los periodos y etapas del manejo ideológico efectuado por el ejecutivo de los estados nacionales peruano y ruso, en ambos casos conducentes a un severo debilitamiento de la esfera parlamentario-legislativa de la última década del siglo XX

La presente labor de investigaciónintenta contribuir con una aproximación a la mirada de losmedios tradicionales y su fase productiva como medio-empresa y su relación medio-poder, al igual que se busca comprender dequé forma el ecosistema digital  y las redes de interconexión social contribuyen a la sobresaturación del espectro comunicativo,contribuyendo en gran medida a una desinformación propia,endógena, de todo proceso de comunicación masiva, por lo que se podría considerar a la desinformación como un estado natural del ecosistema, más que la usual mirada amoral y fuera de contexto de cualquier ética de la comunicación.

Contiene los documentos textuales intercambiados en línea, por profesores investigadores del campo de las ciencias sociales, en la Universidad de Quintana Roo, sobre el significado sociológico de la destrucción del WTC y de parte del pentágono, en septiembre del 2001.  El debate academico inició una semana despues de los acontecimientos, y duró cuatro meses.  Valioso documento de sociología del conocimiento científico, aplicado a coyunturas de emergencia mundial.

The author considers the phenomenon of mannerism and (the similar phenomenon) snobbery of language behaviour in the social communication. The analysis of empiric material is based on a model of linguistic communication, which includes four configured categories: meaning, form/structure, pragmatic function and context. The author treats the mannerisms of language as a preference of the sentence form and structure and thereby causing some pragmatic effects. The author distinguishes several communicative and non-communicative functions of language mannerism: associative (especially the function of positive self-presentation of sender), pragmatic (persuasive) and ethological (aesthetic and hedonic experience).

There has been some time now since mass-media and social media especially started playing an increasingly important role in our lives. Most people go by day by day thinking they know what's happening because they are being kept informed by all the means of communication they have at their disposal. That is television, newspapers, internet and other means of communication to and from the media. What they do not know is how does the media work, they also do not know that they see only what someone wants them to see, and even worse, what they see is not necessarily true. The media can easily manipulate our viewpoint regarding a certain subject like the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq war or the Occupy Wall Street event happening in the present day. In this paper we will try to answer one important question that we think everybody should try to answer, for themselves. We will try to research the answer and see exactly how can we provide an understanding of the inner works of the media mechanism. What is the question? Well, related to what we just stated above, we ask ourselves, and you: How can the mass-media manipulate the viewpoint of the viewer and more importantly, why would it do that?

ABSTRACT Statistics reporting litigated cases of fraud on an exchange-by-exchange basis are not readily available to investors. This paper introduces data from three countries with multiple exchanges operating under different listing standards – Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States – to show litigated cases of fraud significantly vary by country, and the different exchanges within the country. Comparisons are also made to Brazil, China and Germany to assess out-of-sample inferences. The data examined suggest there are significant differences in the nature of observed fraud across exchanges within the United States; by contrast, outside the United States there appears to be a comparative lack of enforcement. The data also suggest policy implications for the ways in which fraud should ideally be reported to improve investor knowledge, market transparency and market quality.

This paper focuses on the pragmatic functioning of manipulation, dealing more specifically with its socio-psychological aspects that tend to be overlooked in Critical Discourse Analysis and pragma-cognitive approaches of the phenomenon. After exposing to what extent the study of Manipulative Discourse (MD) has been hampered by traditional philosophy of language and argumentative/persuasion theories predicated on a truth and morality bias, it demonstrates that MD is parasitic on both Grice’s (1975, 1989) Cooperative Principle and Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies, going beyond both frameworks to propose a model of manipulation that puts equal emphasis on Self and Other. In an attempt at theoretically rebalancing the traditional emphasis on the Other’s face wants in politeness theory, it brings to light three manipulative tactics – as exploited by some characters in the American political TV series House of Cards – that consist in 1. taking advantage of the victims’ emotional vulnerability and/or face needs, 2. consenting to false Self Face-Threatening act (Chen 2001), and 3. using Self Face-Flattering Acts to ‘give a high value’ to the Self as an enticing strategy. Among MD resources are impoliteness moves that are paradoxically exploited to ‘draw in’ the Other, thereby resolving conflict and bridging distance.