The Tactics of Verbal Countermanipulation in Russian Political Video Blogs

Abstract

The author of the article states that in spite of the fact that manipulation has been broadly studied in various areas of science, such as psychology, sociology, politology, linguistics, etc., countermanipulation (the response action to manipulation) has been analysed mainly by psychologists. This phenomenon has not been studied in linguistics yet. The author of the article gives a linguotypological description of the verbal countermanipulation tactics as exemplified in political video blogs reviewing the events with the participation of A. Navalny. A special two-stage algorithm which included a communicative pragmatic analysis was used for revealing countermanipulative intention in political video blogs. The first stage included attentive viewing of the videos and their analysis to determine manipulation upon certain criteria (a hidden aim, use of non-cooperative strategies and tactics and special verbal manipulative techniques). The second stage consisted of analysing the response utterances to define countermanipulative intention (neutralising manipulation), identification of countermanipulative tactics, their definition and classification. As a result of the conducted research, the author of the article has distinguished two groups of countermanipulative tactics: overt opposition tactics and covert opposition tactics. The group of overt opposition tactics includes the tactic of manipulative intention revealing, the tactic of making a question about manipulator’s intentions, the tactic of manipulation technique revealing, the tactic of counterargumentation and the tactic of refusing to change one’s behaviour towards manipulator’s intentions. The covert opposition tactics are the tactic of clarification questions and the tactic of repeating the manipulator’s words. The author points out the importance of further study of verbal countermanipulation from the perspective of solving the problems of the personal and social information security.