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.
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).
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.
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.