From persuasion techniques to pragmatic mechanisms: Unpacking the language of propaganda in English

Pragmatics and Society. 2026.

Poldvere N., Trnavac R., Alvestad S.

In this study, we describe the language of persuasion in a specific type of fake news used to mislead people by often implicit means, namely, propaganda. In this way, propaganda lends itself well to a pragmatic analysis of the underlying mechanisms that are exploited to convince people to adopt a specific ideology or worldview. Our aim is to identify these pragmatic mechanisms, and the linguistic forms through which they are realized, in a systematic way using the Fakespeak-ENG corpus. We both draw on and add to an existing framework of persuasion by taking it as our starting point for identifying persuasion in the corpus texts and by adding to it another analytical layer that takes language more seriously. The results show that the most common persuasion techniques in our propaganda texts are Loaded Language, Appeal to Authority and Appeal to Time, which are characterized by negative sentiment words, reporting verbs and temporal deictic markers, respectively. In addition, we emphasize the manipulative use of figurative language, false implicatures and presuppositions, and typographic emphasis to convey persuasion in more or less subtle ways. Unpacking these linguistic strategies will add to existing work on the language of fake news in general and propaganda in particular, and have real-world implications for automatic propaganda detection and media literacy education.

Keywords: metaphor, evaluation, implicature, fake news, propaganda detection, Fakespeak-ENG corpus