Language & Power Theorists

Language & Power Theorists

1. Wareing (1999)

   • Political Power: power held by those with the backing of the law (e.g. politicians, police, judges, etc.)
   • Personal Power: power held by individuals as a result of roles in organisations/occupations (e.g. teachers and employees).
   • Social Group Power: power held as a result of being a dominant member of a social group through social variables such as class gender and age. In Britain, this is often white middle class men.

2. Norman Fairclough

   • Power in Discourse: the ways in which power in conveyed through language.
   • Power behind Discourse: the focus on the social and ideological reasons behind power.
   • Synthetic Personalisation: the way in which advertising and other forms of communication use personalised language such as the second person pronoun 'you' to construct a relationship between text producer and receiver.
   • Members' Resources: humans' ability to interpret text based on their background knowledge. Text producers can use this to manipulate people.
   • Implied Reader: the target audience of the text. Assumptions made by the text readers' age, gender, class, etc. in order to manipulate them more effectively.
   • Power Asymmetry: the difference between the amount of power speakers have (e.g. teacher/pupil).
   • Powerful Participant: people with higher status in a given context (e.g. teacher/pupil).
   • Less Powerful Participant: people with less status in a given context (e.g. pupil/teacher).

3. Politeness Theory (Goffman; Brown and Levinson)

   • Face: a person's self-esteem and emotional needs.
   • Positive Face: the need to feel wanted, liked and appreciated.
   • Negative Face: the need to have freedom of thought and action and not feel imposed on.
   • Face-threatening Act: a communicative act that threatens someone's positive or negative face.
   • Positive and Negative Politeness Strategies: strategies that a speaker might use to alleviate or avoid FTA's.

4. Glossary

   • Instrumental Power: power used by individuals or groups to maintain and enforce authority.
   • Influential Power: power used to influence and persuade others. Persuasive features are often used to show influential power.
   • Ideology: a set of beliefs/attitudes held by individuals/groups. It does not just mean political beliefs.
   • Epistemic Modality: modal verbs that express degrees of possibility, probability or certainty (e.g. might).
   • Deontic Modality: modal verbs that express degrees of necessity and obligation (e.g. will).
   • Repressive Discourse Strategy: an indirect way of exercising power and control through conversational constraints.
   • Oppressive Discourse Strategy: linguistic behaviour that is open in its exercising of power/control.