The role of implicitness in persuasive argumentation: looking at different text genres

This paper argues for the manipulative potential of linguistic implicit strategies in a variety of text genres, including spoken political discourse, political tweets, spoken and written advertising, and a collection of journalistic texts. Building on the acknowledgment that linguistic implicit communication is an effective means of persuasion, the research relies on the theoretical distinction between implicitation of content and implicitation of responsibility (Lombardi Vallauri 2019). Such taxonomy is presented and used to show that the text genres' features (in terms of compositional structure, thematic content and style) have an impact on the quantity and quality of implicit manipulative strategies used.