Nominalization as an enhancer of linguistic implicitness in political discourse

This paper explores the role played by nominalization in enhancing the persuasive potential of texts by allowing a larger and more effective use of linguistic implicit strategies. The analysis starts from the premise that linguistic implicitness has been proven to be helpful in persuading addressees. The taxonomy of linguistic implicitness proposed in Lombardi Vallauri (2019), based on the distinction between implicitation of contents and implicitation of responsibility, is adopted. Data are extracted from the ANONYMIZED corpus of Italian political discourse. The analysis shows that nominalized forms, quite frequent in political discourse, ease the presence of three different implicit strategies: nominalization, obtained through the packaging of the nominalized forms as definite descriptions; vagueness, obtained through the omission of one of the participants in the action, typically the agent; topicalization, obtained through syntactic and prosodic means. All in all, nominalized forms seem to be able to increase the manipulative power of texts.