Sfruttamento di “immagini” implicite nella pubblicità e nella propaganda politica italiana

Commercials and political propaganda habitually encode implicitly contents that, if expressed explicitly, would be rejected. Sounds can suggest images or contents independently from lexical meanings. Foreign languages can engender impressions of refinement and prestige. More generally, implicits characterize persuasive communication, which typically draws attention to some easily acceptable content, in order to smuggle into the addressees’ beliefs a more doubtful one, which is not discussed exactly because it is conveyed implicitly. Ads use presuppositions to let unexpressed the very act of introducing some content on the part of the source: a content which is presented as already shared by addressees is less likely to be critically evaluated or rejected. Advertising and political propaganda use utterances which, together with their context and the non-linguistic parts of the ads, induce addressees to integrate by conversational implicature the most doubtful content of the message. Addressees, since they have introduced that content by themselves, are less likely to discuss it. These features are presented by commenting on several actual examples of Italian commercial and political ads.