Speech Manipulation in Motivational Business Lectures

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The purpose of the article is to investigate manipulative strategies in public business media discourse. Relevance of this issue is predetermined by the linguopragamitic potential of public business speech. It is necessary to reconise and counteract manipulative techniques which leads to the need for linguistic research into manipulative tactics and most vulnerable targets of manipulation. On the basis of a collection of business lectures, 295 speeches were selected by continuous sampling to analyse persuasive manipulation strategies in the sphere of public business speech. The main research method was functional-pragmatic analysis which helped to reveal manipulative effects and covert intentions of public business media discourse. The paper makes a contribution to pragmatic studies of verbal manipulation and highlights specific manipulative traits of public business lectures: different degrees of preparation of the audience and the presenter, expectation as an important cognitive factor, and applying manipulation models (gradation model, background model, evaluative model, and indirect model). In addition, the concept of business media discourse is analysed and the levers of manipulative influence in motivational discourse are identified (emotions, cognitive sphere, social instincts). The authors conclude that simplification and stereotyping underly the manipulative potential of motivational public speeches. Practical significance of the study is determined by the fact that it helps to identify the speech means used to carry out manipulative influence. The study bridges the gap in the analysis of manipulative means of emergent hybrid genres of business discourse and lays grounds for theoretical analysis of strategies to counter verbal manipulation.