Mentre (‘while’) as a Manipulative Linguistic Device: Perceptual Study Based on Italian Political Tweets on Migrations

Speakers can convey information indirectly as a strategy to persuade addressees of doubtful contents, which would be more easily recognized and rejected if asserted. Specifically, the content of vague or underspecified linguistic expressions is reconstruct ed by addressees themselves, making it less likely that they will reject such information. Political discourse tends to present ideologically charged contents indirectly: e.g., the polyfunctionality of the Italian connective mentre ‘while’ – that can conve y in certain contexts both temporal and adversative meaning – can be used in political tweets to tendentiously suggest a contrastive relation between distinct events involving Italians and migrants, as this tweet shows (Daniela Santachè, @ Santanche, 2020, April 16): Mentre noi eravamo segregati in casa, il governo continuava a far arrivare gli #immigrati. ‘While we were confined indoors, the government continued to let #migrants arrive’. Following recent perception studies, we elaborated an experiment to investigate the manipulative effect of “mentre” in the discursive creation of Italians vs. migrants polarization. Respondents were shown real tweets with “mentre”: stimuli were selected from a corpus of 910 tweets on migrations published by Italian politicians between January-May 2019 and 2020. The corpus is representative of gender, age, party, and institutional role of Italian politicians, but this information was not shown to respondents . The experiment consisted of a questionnaire, in which participants (volunteers) saw both manipulative/vague and neutral uses of “mentre”. After each stimulus, participants were requested to read a sentence, extracted from a tweet, and to decide upon the relation between the elements or events mentioned in it . To prevent unintentional bias and overthinking, participants were only provided with an approximate description of the project.