GASLIGHTING, POLITENESS, AND THE ILLUSION OF COOPERATION: A STUDY OF MANIPULATIVE DISCOURSE

Gaslighting, a manipulative strategy aimed at undermining the victims confidence in his/her perception of reality and reasoning, constitutes a complex discourse practice with significant pragmatic and cognitive dimensions.Despite its relevance to interactional communication, gaslighting has received limited attention within the field of linguistic pragmatics. Drawing on Brown and Levinsons (1987) politeness theory, Culpepers (1996, 2015) impoliteness framework, Grices (1989) cooperative principle, and recent work on manipulation by Sorlin (2017) and Spear (2019), this study conceptualises gaslighting as a discourse strategy that systematically exploits (im)politeness, facework, and maxim violations to generate epistemic uncertainty and restrict the hearers agency.The empirical material consists of selected excerpts from Changeling (2008), analysed through a qualitative discourse-pragmatic framework. A large language model, ChatGPT (GPT-5; OpenAI, 2025), was employed as an auxiliary analytical tool to provide emotion-neutral, unbiased interpretations of linguistic strategies.The findings demonstrate that gaslighting relies on an ambivalent interplay of politeness and impoliteness, simultaneously attending to and threatening both positive and negative face.