Constraining context selection: On the pragmatic inevitability of manipulation

In this paper, I propose a new take on manipulation that focuses on the hearer's cognitive processing of manipulative utterances, thereby avoiding some of the descriptive and explanatory limitations of other approaches to manipulation (see de Saussure and Schulz, 2005 for discussion). I will follow Sperber and Wilson (1995) and posit that interpretation is a context building process through which contextual assumptions are incrementally added to an interpretative context subset.The main argument in this paper presents an analytic model that captures the specificity of manipulative strategies as attempts to exploit the inherent limitations of these context selection processes. Specifically, manipulation will be shown to be best accounted for as a form of communication that tries to interfere with the order of accessibility of contextual assumptions to ensure that the hearer's interpretation of a manipulative utterance only accesses a sub-optimal set of contextual assumption, crucially preventing her from accessing a dissonant, although optimal, set (see Maillat and Oswald, 2009).The pragmatics of such interpretative biases, it will be argued, is best accounted for within a relevance-theoretic framework, as the model posits that the cognitive mechanisms which govern interpretation are error-prone as a result of our ‘cognitive optimism’ (Sperber et al., 1995 and Sperber et al., 2010).