Implicit pragmatic phenomena in headlines of Hungarian health-related fake news

Fake news is often designed with clickbait headlines to reach a wide readership. The current work focuses on implicit pragmatic phenomena in fake news headlines, namely implicit arguments, implicit contents in speech acts, and implicatures, in order to add to the findings of earlier research on the topic. It provides a corpus-based analysis of Hungarian health-related fake news headlines. It concludes that (i) implicit arguments in headlines create an information gap and are only used as tools of manipulation to generate clicks; (ii) the intended perlocutionary effect of the headlines that appear as speech acts with incomplete propositional content or implicit illocutionary force is not the effective transfer of information but rather to evoke emotions manipulatively; (iii) the goal of the unfair use of implicatures may be to avoid responsibility. This study reveals that the special combination of explicit and implicit content in fake news headlines can create or widen an information gap, manipulate readers by generating psychological effects, convey false information, and stimulate peripheral processing.