Manipulation in Political Discourse: A Linguistic Study of U.S.A Presidential Debates in the Context of Grice's Co-operative Principle

This study introduces an attempt to scrutinize the interrelationship between language and thought; in particular, how language can shape, influence and direct thought, and how thought can be represented in language. Such a thorny task is achieved by approaching the 2004 U.S.A presidential debates, held between Bush and Kerry, in virtue of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and maxims. The Gricean pragmatics is evidently enriching when tackling a corpus of a political nature; i.e political language is demarcated by inherent manipulation since it is originally used to affect people’s minds to think in a certain way as a means of helping a politician to achieve his ultimate aim—usually gaining power and authority. Harmoniously, pragmatics in general, and the Gricean pragmatics in particular, are the most manipulative areas in the field of linguistics since they are primarily concerned with how people manage to say one thing and convey another which may be different or even contradictory. Hence, this research dwells upon the political maneuvering practiced by both candidates in order to prove that linguistics can virtually provide an efficient tool for decoding a political phenomenon.

is an assistant lecturer in the Department of English Language, Faculty of Arts, Tanta University, Egypt. She received her Master's degree in English Linguistics in the same department. In 2010, she obtained a German Egyptian Research Long-Term Scholarship (GERLS) to carry out her PhD in English Linguistics in Germany.