Acknowledgments

This book comes after a long period of neverending research on the manipulative nature of implicit language. Research which unveiled both its sociointeractional and experimental facets in the guise of presuppositions, topicalisations, implicatures and vague expressions, among others. In this volume, I have not devoted much attention to experimental evidence, which is more extensively described in other recent behavioral and neurophysiological works (see references at the bottom). Instead, I wanted to zoom in on other interdisciplinary perspectives on manipulative language involving, among other things, (a) its relation to the encoding of evidentiality in human communication as well as in political discourse, (b) how it percolates into the language of the news thus contributing to make it a strongly ideologically biased type of text, and (c) on how manipulation, as caused by the use of implicit communication, may become the outcome of different translation choices. These are all domains in which (oral and written) text production becomes a crucial activity in spreading new sets of interrelated beliefs and ideologies among text users. In the last chapter, I wished to bring home to two important ongoing projects of sensitization to the phenomenon of implicit communication and to the positive effects of “teaching” how to deal with implicit contents in a message as a way to contribute to the creation of what Sbisà (2007) called a “culture of implicitness”, that is a massive collective intellectual endowment through which people of any age can smoothly navigate the traps of manipulative implicit communication and defend themselves from its most dangerous effects. The path of interdisciplinary reflection chosen for this volume is therefore targeted at improving people’s ability to inspect presumptive meanings in a message and understand how they can “distort their way of seeing things” and their knowledge of reality. Indeed, it is my belief that the more familiar people become with the manipulative traps of implicit communication, the lower the cost of unearthing such traps as well as the manipulator’s real intentions hidden behind them.

Besides making the reader acquainted with the strongly felt and challenging topic of deceptive communication, this volume also stems from the experience of my participation in the PRIN project called IMPAQTS – Implicit Manipulation in Politics Quantitatively Assessing the Tendentiousness of Speeches (Project code: 2017STJCE9), to which Chapter Six is also dedicated. I therefore take the opportunity to thank all its collaborators, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Patrizio Campisi, Emanuele Maiorana, Alessandro Panunzi, Emanuela Piciucco, Federica Cominetti, Laura Baranzini, Doriana Cimmino, Giorgia Mannaioli, Claudia Coppola, Giulia Giunta, Irene Leonardi, Teresa Andreozzi and Paola Vernillo for their hard and untiring work and for allowing a very satisfying exchange of views and always new ideas.

I also want to thank my long-time mentor, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri (Roma Tre University), for bringing me into the fascinating world of implicit communication and its heterogeneous facets since my early doctoral experience.

Finally, many thanks to my family for being a constant presence in my life through good times and bad, and to Alessandro, for his infinite love.