Language and power

Types of power
1. Political (held by someone with the backing of the law
2. Personal (held due to someone's role in an organisation)
3. Social group (held due to being a member of a dominant group)
4. Instrumental (used to maintain and enforce authority)
5. Influential (used to influence or persuade)
Fairclough (2001)
1. Power in discourse (ways in which power is manifested in situations through language)
2. Power behind discourse (social and ideological reasons behind how power is used)
3. Critical linguists/discourse analysis (fairclough) say no example of language use is neutral - always has elements of an ideological viewpoint
Keywords
1. Ideology - set of belief systems or views held by individuals/ groups
2. Power in spoken discourse
  1. power asymmetry (marked difference in power status)
  2. unequal encounter (highlights power one speaker has over another)
  3. Powerful participant - higher status, imposes a degree of power)
  4. less powerful participant less status
  5. Constraints (ways powerful participants block or control less powerful ones
3. Face
  1. persons self esteem/ emotional needs
  2. Positive face (nee to feel wanted)
  3. Negative face (nee to have freedom of thought)
Verbs
1. Epistemic modality (express possibility, probability or certainty)
2. Deontic modality (express necessity and obligation)
Frame works
1. Discourse
  1. how is text organised
  2. what devices are used to assist meaning
2. Lexis and semantics
  1. vocab choices
  2. lexical fields
  3. relationship between words (synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy)
  4. formality of lexical choices
  5. use of pronouns to establish relationship with reader
3. Grammar
  1. what verb processes dominate
  2. epistemic/ deontic used?
  3. declaritive/ imperitive sentences?
4. Pragmatics
  1. relationship between producer and reciever?
  2. implied author and reader
  3. conversational strategies
  4. implied/shared meanings?
  5. ideological assumptions
Power in advertising
1. persuasive
2. powerful
3. 1) synthetic personalisation (way things use second person pronoun 'you' to make a relationship between producer and receiver)
  1. 2) members resources (background knowledge that readers use to interpret texts drawn out by producers)
    1. 3) building the consumer (puts receiver in desired position)

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Language and power

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	Created by madallen6344 over 11 years ago