Power

• Language + power - refers to the vocabulary + linguistic strategies people use to assert + maintain power over others.
• Shan Wareing 1999:

  • according to Wareing, there are 3 main types of power:
  • political power - power held by people with authority
  • personal power - power based on an individual’s occupation or ole in society.
  • social group power - power held by a group of people due to certain factors e.g class, ethnicity, gender or age.
• Waring suggested the 3 types of power can be divided into 2 groups:

  • instrumental power - authoritative power, possession of power simply because of who they are.
  • people or organisations with instrumental power use language to maintain or enforce their authority.
  • influential power - refers to when a person (or group of people) does not have any authority but is trying to gain power + influence over others.
• Examples of instrumental power:

  • formal register
  • imperative/declarative
  • modal verbs
  • mitigation
  • conditonal sentences
• Examples of influential power:

  • assertions
  • metaphors
  • leaded language
  • embedded assumptions
• Features of power + language:

  • emotive language
  • figurative language
  • forms of address
  • synthetic personalisation
  • interrogatives
  • modal verbs
  • imperatives
  • alliteration
  • assonance
  • rising + falling intonation
• Fairclough 1984: in 'language and power' 1984, Faircough explains how language serves as a tool to maintain and create power in society.
• Fairclough suggests that many encounters are unequal and that the language we use reflects the power structures in society.
• Fairclough recommends using 'critical discourse analysis' to recognise when language is being used by the powerful to influence or persuade us.
• Power in discourse refers to the lexicon, strategies, and ideological structures used to create power.
• Power behind discourse refers to the sociological and ideological reasons behind who is asserting power over others and why.
• Fairclough introduces the concept of 'synthetic personalisation', a technique that large corporations use to create a sense of friendship between themselves and their potential customers by addressing them on a personal level.
• Brown + Levinson 1987

  • politeness theory - stated that the levels of politeness we use with others are often dependant on power relations - the more powerful they are, the more polite we are.
• Goffman 1967:

  • face work theory - those in less powerful positions are more likely to perform face-saving acts (preventing others from feeling publicly embarrassed) for those with more power.
• Sinclair + Coulthard 1975

  • introduced the ‘initiation - response - feedback model’ which states that we teacher (one with power) initiates the discourse by asking a question, the student (one without power) gives a response, + the teacher provides feedback.
• Grice 1975

  • Grice’s conversational maxims, ‘The Gricean Maxims’ are based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle, which aims to explain how people achieve effective communication in everyday situations.
  • Grice introduced 4 conversational maxims:
  • maxim of quality
  • maxim of quantity
  • maxim of relevance
  • maxim of manner
  • these maxims can be flouted or violated -> e.g metaphor, mishearing someone, using vocab listener wont understand or lying.