The main concern of this work is to tackle manipulation in communicative events as one of the
means used by politicians to achieve certain goals such as influencing the behavior desire
belief and emotions of others to their self-interests without evident detection of their
communicative intention. As a communicative event and from a pragmatic point of view
manipulation in the political field has not been given enough attention. Thus this study
scrutinizes the pragmatic aspects of manipulation in British and American political debates. As
such it sets itself the task of achieving several aims the most important of which are: (1)
specifying the pragmatic criterion criteria according to whose presence a certain political
debate is considered as manipulative (2) identifying the manipulation types used by
politicians and the pragmatic strategies via which each type is fulfilled (3) exhibiting the
whole pragmatic structure of manipulative whether British or American political debates (4)
pinpointing both the manipulative pragmatic strategies used to fulfill each sub-stage
(component) and manipulative strategies adopted to attain all the sub-stages (components) of
the entire pragmatic structure of manipulation (5) highlighting the manipulative pragmatic
strategies the manipulative strategies as well as the manipulation types highly resorted to
by politicians in political debates (6) showing transparent inter intra-differences that can
be detected in terms of the debater's employment of manipulation types the whole pragmatic
structure of manipulation the manipulative pragmatic strategies and the manipulative
strategies used by the debaters and (7) developing a pragmatic model for identifying the types
of manipulation and the pragmatic strategies used to fulfill each type in addition to another
eclectic model to analyze the pragmatic structure and strategies of the data under scrutiny.
