Manipulative discourse has attracted a lot of attention in various adjacent domains of linguistic research, notably in rhetoric, argumentation theory, philosophy of language, discourse analysis, pragmatics, among others. We start with a review of the existing definitions provided in these fields and highlight some of the difficulties they encounter. In particular, we argue that there is still a need for an analytic model that makes predictions about manipulative discourse. We propose an alternative account of manipulation couched in the relevance-theoretic framework which treats manipulation as a two-step communicative attempt at misleading the context-selection process when interpreting a target utterance. We argue further that such attempts systematically exploit the inherent weaknesses or flaws of the human cognitive system that are amply discussed in cognitive psychology under the heading of “cognitive illusions”. We claim that such a model correctly captures classical instances of manipulative discourse which fall outside the scope of other accounts.

This paper proposes a cognitive-pragmatic alternative to the traditional, speech-acttheoretic, account of the notion of commitment. The perspective adopted here questions the relevance of addressing actual commitment as a speaker category and shifts the focus of the discussion from properties of speaker commitment to processes ofcommitment attribution. Using a relevance-theoretic framework, it will be suggested that inferring commitment in ordinary, cooperative, communication is part of the processes by which hearers derive speaker meaning, and that the degree of reliability that a hearer may expect to attain in attributing commitment to a speaker correlates with the degree of certainty associated to the derivation of explicatures and implicatures from an utterance.