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76644-01 - Colloquium: Kommunikation im Beruf: Implicit communication in commercial advertising and political discourse (1 CP)
| Semester | fall semester 2025 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Filippo Pecorari (filippo.pecorari@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | The main strategies of implicit communication traditionally studied by pragmatics, i.e. presupposition and implicature, have a strong potential for the needs of public communication. In commercial advertising and political discourse, aimed at convincing the audience to buy a certain product or to vote for a certain party, implicitness plays a major role. This is due to its ability to conceal critical parts of the message or the very responsibility of the speaker for uttering it, thus shielding implicit meaning from possible discussion by the audience. When someone says, for example, “let’s make America great again”, (s)he presupposes that America has been great in the past but currently is not; the latter content is not asserted explicitly by the speaker, but taken for granted as part of shared knowledge. This pragmatic property leads the audience not to pay attention to implicit content and ultimately to accept it as true, even though it is highly questionable. The colloquium will explore the persuasive effects of implicit communication in commercial and political discourse, taking into account the different pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms underlying the use of different varieties of presuppositions and implicatures. We will analyze a wealth of examples, taken from Italian and English texts, with the aim of identifying the linguistic traces of implicitly conveyed information and making it explicit in a rigorous and objective way. The application of explicitation practices proposed by pragmatic studies will allow us to go beyond what is explicitly said in persuasive and ideological messages and to enhance their critical reception. |
| Bibliography | Garassino, Davide/Brocca, Nicola/Masia, Viviana (2022), “Is implicit communication quantifiable? A corpus-based analysis of British and Italian political tweets”, Journal of Pragmatics, 194: 9–22. Grice, Herbert Paul (1975), “Logic and Conversation”, in Cole, Peter/Morgan, Jerry L. (eds.), Syntax and Semantics. Speech Acts, Academic Press, New York-London, 41–58. Levinson, Stephen C. (1983), Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo (2019), La lingua disonesta. Contenuti impliciti e strategie di persuasione, Il Mulino, Bologna. Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo/Masia, Viviana (2014), “Implicitness impact: Measuring texts”, Journal of Pragmatics, 61: 161–184. Sbisà, Marina (2007), Detto non detto. Le forme della comunicazione implicita, Laterza, Roma-Bari. Sbisà, Marina (2021), “Presupposition and implicature: Varieties of implicit meaning in explicitation practices”, Journal of Pragmatics, 182: 176–188. |
| Language of instruction | German |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| unregelmässig | See individual dates | ||
Dates
| Date | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday 23.10.2025 | 18.15-20.00 | Kollegienhaus, Seminarraum 103 |
| Modules |
Modul: Forschungspraxis und Vertiefung (Master's degree program: Language and Communication) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Departement Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften |