Peculiarities of verbal manipulation techniques in spam e-mails

The article is devoted to the analysis of pragmalinguistic properties of spam emails, namely the use in spam emails of different techniques of verbal manipulation. The aim of this study is, on the one hand, to identify and consider the verbal manipulation techniques in spam e-mails used by the authors of such e-mails, on the other hand, to analyze the impact of verbal manipulation on the recipients of spam e-mails. The research material comprises the e-mails which were automatically filtered by Mail.ru and Rambler.ru servers as "spam". The selected spam e-mails exploit the topic of finance as this topic prevails in the analyzed spam traffic. The article considers spam e-mails as a special type of the speech genre "e-mail", moreover, differences between "spam e-mails" and "e-mail marketing" are specified. Verbal manipulation in spam e-mails is defined as a relevant speech genre component; within it stands out a number of typical manipulative techniques. The latter are divided into two groups: the manipulative verbal techniques, using as a tool of manipulation pragmatic characteristics of spam e-mails and manipulative verbal techniques, the main instrument of which is the content. The article presents quantitative data on the frequency of use of the analyzed verbal manipulative techniques by the authors of spam e-mails. Finally, the article discusses the results of a linguistic survey on the perception of spam e-mails by e-mail users - on the one hand, we reveal the degree of recognition of spam e-mails in general, on the other hand, identify the verbal techniques with the greatest manipulative impact on the recipients of spam e-mails.

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