Guilt-Tripping in Gaslighting Discourse: From Self-Trust to “I’m Sorry”

Abstract

This study examines guilt-tripping as a pragmatic technique used in gaslighting discourse, emphasising how emotional responsibility is linguistically constructed and interpreted. The analysis employs Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95a; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Carston & Powell, 2009), critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989; Van Dijk, 2006; Maillat & Oswald, 2011), and perspectives from truth-conditional semantics (Vanderveken, 1990; Seuren, 1998; Nordquist, 2025). The empirical data include dialogue extracts from contemporary film and television, such as No One Would Tell (1996), Before I Go to Sleep (2014), Alice, Darling(2022), Resurrection (2022), Priscilla'(2023), and Fake (2024). A qualitative analysis of fifteen dialogue segments explores how explicitly encoded content interacts with pragmatically inferred meaning. The findings identify three types of guilt-tripping – speaker-referential, hearer-referential, and dual-referential – each representing distinct patterns of responsibility attribution. In all instances, guilt-tripping functions throughthe interaction of entailment and implicature, whereby ostensibly factual propositions serve as cognitive anchorsfor evaluative inferences. This mechanism facilitates the internalisation of responsibility while preservingplausible deniability. The study views guilt-tripping as a linguistically mediated and cognitively rooted strategy, enhancing research on manipulative discourse and providing a structured understanding of guilt induction in gaslighting.