speech manipulation

The article examines fraudulent discourse – a special type of discourse, the purpose of which is to take possession of other people’s property and obtain benefits through deceit or breach of trust. The author differentiates the legal understanding of the phenomenon of “fraud” and its perception in the ordinary worldview. It is proved that the concept of fraudulent discourse should include a number of communicative acts qualified by the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation as theft or extortion.

The given research is a continuation of the series of articles devoted to contrastive research in speech domination in the Russian and Chinese languages. In Chinese as well as in Russian, by using the pronoun «мы» («we») instead of other pronouns, an addresser substitutes the semantic composition of the subject and thereby manipulates the addressee in order to control the way the latter understands the message. As a result, he pronoun «мы» reflects common laws of communicative human behaviour in both languages.