Implicit strategies are known to increase persuasion performances. Implicits of content (vagueness, implicatures) and implicits of responsibility (presuppositions, topics) will be compared semiotically to non-linguistic implicits such as images and sounds. The results of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments will be used to propose that presuppositions and topics arose in language as means to spare addressees processing effort on already known contents, but they were subsequently “exapted” to spare effort on unknown marginal contents, and eventually to reduce the probability for doubtful contents to be processed thoroughly and rejected. This will be shown by many examples from commercial advertising and political propaganda.
The paper shows that implicit strategies for questionable contents are frequent in persuasive texts, as compared to texts with other purposes. It proposes that the persuasive and manipulative effectiveness of introducing questionable contents implicitly can be explained through established cognitive patterns, namely that what is felt by addressees as information coming (also) from them and not (only) from the source of the message is less likely to be challenged. These assumptions are verified by showing examples of “implicitness of evidential responsibility” (essentially, presuppositions, and topics) as triggers of lesser attention in advertising and propaganda. A possible evolutionary path is sketched for three different pragmatic functions of presuppositions, leading to their availability for manipulation. The distraction effect of presuppositions and topics is also explained in relation with recent developments of Relevance Theory. Behavioral evidence that presuppositions and topics induce low epistemic vigilance and shallow processing is compared to recent neurophysiological evidence which does not confirm this assumption, showing greater processing costs for presuppositions and topics as compared to assertions and foci. A proposal is put forward to reconcile these apparently contrasting data and to explain why they may not be in contrast after all. Also due to natural language quick processing constraints (a “Now-or-Never processing Bottleneck”), effort devoted to accommodation of presupposed or topicalized new contents may drain resources from concurrent epistemic vigilance and critical evaluation, resulting in shallower processing.
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