“Diciamo la verità!” Esplicitezza e implicitezza nella retorica populista di Matteo Salvini

Political discourse is an important testbed for establishing how implicitness can be exploited for manipulative purposes. However, this research strain needs to tackle two issues: since implicitness is ubiquitous in human communication, the first step consists in identifying linguistic resources that are actually used for the purpose of occult persuasion in a given context; secondly, those resources need to be assessed in terms of their manipulative power. This chapter illustrates the latest stage of a broader research project dealing with the language of far-right populist political leaders, focusing on the Italian case of Matteo Salvini. Through an automatic statistical procedure, the keywords characterizing speeches delivered by Salvini between 2014 and 2016 are extracted from a 100,000-word corpus. Subsequently, their concordances are analyzed to identify the strategies deployed to persuade the audience through implicit content. This survey illustrates how implicitness is pervasive of the topics that may be considered the four pillars of populist discourse: the people, the enemies, the dangerous “others” and the crisis.