Language and Power

• What do you think about curses?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnA0ekak60E&feature=PlayList&p=CA12B98514F64706&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=13

Instrumental Power

• Instrumental power is explicit power of the sort imposed by the state, by its laws and conventions or by the organizations for which we work.

• It operates in business, education and various kinds of management. (In many, but not all cases, if we resist instrumental power, we will be subject to some penalty or in trouble.)

Influential Power

•Neither rule nor law, neither discipline nor hierarchy sanctions influential power. •It inclines us or makes us want to behave in certain ways or adopt opinions or attitudes, without obvious force. •It operates in such social phenomena as advertising, culture and the media. (Strictly, we are not coerced into buying what the advertiser shows us, nor will we suffer any penalty for our "sales resistance".)

What to Look For

• In looking at how power is exercised through language, you should be able to refer to real examples you have found, and explain these texts. But you should also have a theoretical approach that will enable you to interpret language data you are presented with in an exam.

• Among other things, you should look at pragmatics and speech act theory, lexis and semantics (forms and meanings), forms that include or exclude (insiders or outsiders), structures (at phrase, clause and discourse level), forms of address, phatic tokens, as well as structural features of speech, which may be used to exercise or establish power.

• In some contexts, you will need to be able to show how rhetorical devices are used to influence an audience

Persuasive techniques in language

• Rhetorical Question• Simile and Metaphor• List of three• Parallelism• Alliteration• Authoritative Sources• Slang• Second person/direct address• Inclusive pronouns

Advertising and special lexis

• Go on. Take off. (Reduced-price flights/British Airways) • Imagine a healthier fitter you. (Tanita body fat monitor) • Move Mountains. (Sim City 4 PC/Dixons) • Not so much a price as an invitation. (Flights to Spain/Iberia Airways) • Every year 39,200 women are newly diagnosed with breast cancer.

(Medical insurance/AXA PPP healthcare) • Go Mobile. (Voyager laptop computer/Evesham Technology) • A win, win, win, win, win, win situation. (6 months' free business

banking/Barclays) • Demon slashes all broadband set-up fees. (Broadband Internet

service/Demon)

Grammar and advertising

• One very common technique is for the author to set nouns and noun phrases or verbs on their own, where the reader or listener supplies the missing elements by conjecture - rather as in interpreting notes, so that, for instance, "does what it says on the tin" is understood as "this product meets the claims that are printed on the side of the tin".

Grammar and advertising

• Happy New Rate • Deals to remember • Free delivery plus Buy now pay 2004 • EMAIL, INTERNET & TEXT MESSAGES • Winter welcome • Free servicing for 3 years • Summer seats on sale • new year new fares • The confidence to succeed • Precious metal for precious little

Semantics and advertising

• In the UK, there are some state controls on what advertisers may or may not claim about their products. Advertisers, therefore, often exploit the possibilities of connotation (suggested meaning) rather than strict denotation (stated meaning) and imply that products have various merits, without saying so explicitly.

Political rhetoric

• alliteration, • allusion, • antithesis (inversion), • asking questions and suggesting answers, • lists (especially of three items), • metaphor (especially extended metaphor), • parallelism, • parenthesis, • Repetition,• redundant questioning.

• "This election is not about the miners; not about the militants; not about the power of the unions: it's about the disastrous failure of three and a half years of Conservative government which has turned Britain from the path of prosperity to the road of ruin."

• What is Mr. Wilson doing here? • We find:

– repetition of the formula "not about", – antithesis between "is not about" and "it's about". – "Path of prosperity" and "road of ruin" repeat the same form,

– Use alliteration and are related metaphors.

King and Obama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-up2xyRvN2U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=Jll5baCAaQU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWuXpfXSl5Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQWxgnFc1fk

Parliamentary and unparliamentary language

• In the UK Parliament, a range of special language features marks proceedings. These include: – a special lexicon and forms of address, – disallowing personally abusive epithets – use of special structures – Parliamentary privilege - freedom from liability for slander – rules for taking and holding turns – procedures for supportive and explicatory interventions – submission to the arbitration of the chairman or woman, the

Speaker and Deputy Speakers.

Hidden Messages

• In all aspects of our culture, certain ideas are implied:• Men are leaders• Women are pretty• Youth is good• Age is bad• What else?• How are these messages conveyed in language?• How do these assumptions have power over us?

Influential power - media

• While any text may be influenced by the maker's preconceptions and world view, many media texts arise from an explicit intention of promoting given values or attitudes, whether sincerely, because the author believes in them, or cynically, to attract an audience.

• As students of language, you have no interest in this - your concern is the language features in which these attitudes are embodied or expressed.

• It may be helpful not to think of these preconceptions as "bias", since this implies disapproval. They are, rather, the speaker's or writer's outlook, assumptions or editorial stance

Influential power - culture

• The notion of a canon of classic works of art has not gone away, but is in creative tension with alternative contemporary visions.

• We cannot readily call these modern since this label has been appropriated for works from the early 20th century, and post-modern smacks of the 1980s. Some works, hailed in the moment of publication or exhibition as masterpieces, are quickly forgotten. Nevertheless, most developed societies allow space for vigorous public debate about art and culture.

• And we are comfortable with a distinction between popular, lowbrow or commercial music, writing and so on, and serious, classical or highbrow art.

Instrumental power - law

• While some legal processes are used to enact power, others are devised to allow lawyers to persuade a judge or a jury, within an adversarial system of persuasion.

• This has its own distinctive language forms, and is much more constrained by rules than other kinds of persuasion - so much so that failure to obey the rules can overturn the decisions of a court. David Crystal (Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, p. 374) distinguishes between the language of the legislature (Parliament) which institutes a legal text (sets down the law in written form) and the language of the judiciary (law courts and judges) which interprets and applies it.

Instrumental power - education

• There are power structures in education, from nurseries to universities, but these are often concealed from those who are subject to them.

• Schools often produce codes or summaries or lists of rules, but these may have only a local or relative force, since the school itself is subject to laws that protect the interests of different groups.

• We can perhaps helpfully distinguish educational institutions (other than officer training colleges for the police and armed forces) from the armed services, which have explicit published regulations, a clear hierarchy of command, and tribunals to resolve the few disputed cases that defy this system.

• In recent times some UK schools and universities may have required parents or students to give assent to a code of rules or "home-school agreement", but there is no universal model for these, and few parents or students would accept that attending a school has the same force in imposing rules, as joining the army or police service.

• Educational establishments have some powers of last resort, such as temporary or permanent exclusion but otherwise have very much to derive their power from the consent of those who are governed

Instrumental power - business and management

• There are useful general approaches that we can take in analysing and explaining language interchanges in various social contexts, but some features are relevant to one social context more than another.

• Private enterprise (in much of the English-speaking world) is regulated by some laws that, for example, describe and defend the human rights and welfare of employees, but it is not organized into a universal system, so that language use can emerge rather as a fashion - and power may come partly from using the current or the most novel special forms.

Language and Power:What Data?

• Rules and regulations• Adverts and campaigns• Speeches• Conversations between:

– Teacher and pupil– Police and accused– Employer and employee– Men and women – see Language and gender!– Lawyers and clients– Courtroom exchanges– What other power relationships can you think of?

Power?!

• Who has power over you?• How do they exercise it?• How do you resist it?• How does language play a part in this?