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Language is never a neutral conduit for ideas. It is one of the principal mechanisms through which power is exercised, legitimised, contested and occasionally resisted. Whenever one person can influence what another believes, says or does through words, power is operating linguistically. This lesson examines that relationship in depth, building on Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis, Wareing's typology of power, and the politeness and face theory of Brown and Levinson and Goffman. It is one of the most versatile topics on the course: although it sits within Paper 2 (Language Diversity and Change, 2h30, 100 marks, 40% of the A-Level; Section A is a single 30-mark evaluative essay on diversity or change), the analytical machinery you develop here also drives the Paper 1 textual analysis, where you may meet political speeches, advertisements or institutional encounters as unseen data. Mastering power therefore pays a double dividend.
Key Definition: Power in language study is the capacity of individuals or institutions to influence, control or constrain the beliefs, behaviour and communication of others through linguistic means. It can be visible and coercive, or invisible and consensual — and the most durable power is often the kind that does not look like power at all.
A clear starting framework is offered by Shân Wareing (1999), who distinguishes three broad categories of power according to who holds it and how it is exercised.
Key Definition: Political power is institutional and law-backed; personal power derives from an individual's role or occupation; social group power is structural, flowing from membership of a dominant social category.
Cutting across Wareing's typology is Fairclough's (1989) distinction between two ways power is enacted in language.
Key Definition: Instrumental power is power that is explicitly enforced through authority, rules and institutions. One party directly controls or constrains another's behaviour, and the authority is overt.
Examples include a judge instructing a jury, a police officer issuing a caution, a teacher setting homework, an employer giving a direct order. Instrumentally powerful language tends to be direct, imperative and declarative, drawing on a formal register and on lexis that names sanctions ("must," "required," "failure to comply"). The power is backed by the institution the speaker represents, so disobedience carries consequences.
Key Definition: Influential power operates through persuasion, shaping opinions and attitudes without direct coercion. It works by influencing how people think rather than dictating what they do.
Examples include advertising that shapes consumer desire, political rhetoric that frames debate, media coverage that determines which stories are told, and textbooks that define legitimate knowledge. Influential power is subtler and arguably more pervasive than instrumental power, because it operates through choices — about what to say, what to leave unsaid, and what to present as common sense.
| Power Type | Mechanism | Typical Example | Characteristic Language Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instrumental | Authority, coercion, sanction | Judge's instruction; employer's order | Imperatives, declaratives, modals of obligation, formal register |
| Influential | Persuasion, ideology, consent | Advertising; political rhetoric | Rhetorical questions, inclusive pronouns, emotive lexis, presupposition |
A sophisticated point for the exam: the two often combine. A government leaflet might instruct (instrumental — "you must register by 31 March") while simultaneously persuading (influential — "help us keep your community safe"). Identifying the blend, rather than forcing a text into one box, signals strong AO2 understanding.
Norman Fairclough (1989, 2001) developed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a systematic method for exposing how power relations are embedded in ordinary language. CDA examines a text at three connected levels:
Key Definition: Power in discourse is power exercised within an interaction — who controls the topic, who allocates turns, who is interrupted or silenced. Power behind discourse is the structural power that determines what discourses are possible in the first place — who owns the newspaper, who sets the exam, which varieties count as "correct."
This distinction is the single most useful analytical tool in the topic. Power in discourse is visible in the moment: the barrister who controls a witness with closed questions, the interviewer who decides what is asked, the chair who grants and withdraws the floor. Power behind discourse is invisible in the moment but decisive: the editorial line that shapes what appears in print, the curriculum that defines legitimate knowledge, the social norms that make a regional accent a liability in a job interview. A strong essay moves between the two levels, showing how a single interruption (power in discourse) is underwritten by an institutional hierarchy (power behind discourse).
Key Definition: Synthetic personalisation (Fairclough) is the use of personalised, friendly language to address a mass audience as though each member were an individual, manufacturing a sense of intimacy that masks an unequal, impersonal relationship.
The clearest examples are commercial and political: "Because you're worth it," "Your council, working for you," the bank that calls you a "valued customer." The second-person pronoun "you" does the heavy lifting, simulating a one-to-one conversation while the producer in fact addresses millions. The strategy disguises asymmetry — the corporation knows nothing of you in particular — as warmth, which is precisely why Fairclough treats it as an exercise of influential power.
Consider the layered example of an energy company's letter that opens "Dear Valued Customer" and continues "We know how important it is for you and your family to stay warm this winter, which is why we're working hard to keep your bills fair." Here synthetic personalisation operates through the possessive "your family," the empathetic mental-process verb "know," and the reassuring inclusive "we're working hard," all of which construct a caring, individualised relationship. Yet the salutation "Dear Valued Customer" betrays the artifice: a genuinely personal letter would use a name. The mismatch between the simulated intimacy and the mass-produced reality is exactly the ideological sleight of hand Fairclough identifies — the language manufactures consent to an unequal commercial relationship by dressing it in the clothing of friendship.
Naturalisation is the process by which particular ways of using language become so familiar that they appear natural and inevitable rather than ideological. When a newspaper writes "Shots were fired," the agentless passive removes the question of who fired, and over time this framing comes to feel like simply "how news is written." Marketisation of discourse is Fairclough's (1993) related observation that public institutions — universities, the NHS, government services — have increasingly adopted the vocabulary of commerce: "customers," "stakeholders," "service delivery," "the student experience." The lexical shift both reflects and reinforces the spread of market ideology into public life, reframing citizens, patients and learners as consumers.
Power is not only about command; it is also negotiated through the delicate management of social relationships. The dominant framework here is politeness theory.
Key Definition: Face (Goffman, 1955; developed by Brown and Levinson, 1987) is the public self-image a person claims in interaction. Positive face is the desire to be liked, approved of and included; negative face is the desire to be unimpeded, autonomous and free from imposition.
Brown and Levinson (1987) argued that many acts inherently threaten face — these are face-threatening acts (FTAs). A request threatens the hearer's negative face (it imposes); a criticism threatens positive face (it disapproves). To soften FTAs, speakers deploy politeness strategies:
Power shapes which strategy is required. A subordinate making a request of a superior must invest heavily in negative politeness to mitigate the imposition; a superior issuing the same instruction downwards can do so baldly, "on record," without redress. This asymmetry is exactly what Fairclough means by an unequal encounter — an interaction (doctor–patient, teacher–pupil, officer–suspect) in which one participant has institutional power and can therefore control topic, turn-taking, question type and the amount of politeness work each party must perform. The more powerful participant typically asks the questions, sets the agenda, interrupts with impunity and uses fewer mitigating forms.
The mirror image of politeness is theorised by Jonathan Culpeper (1996) and Derek Bousfield (2008), who study impoliteness — the deliberate use of face-attacking strategies to exercise or contest power. Culpeper distinguishes, among others, bald-on-record impoliteness (direct attack), positive impoliteness (snubbing, excluding, using inappropriate identity markers) and negative impoliteness (condescension, invading space, explicit threats). Impoliteness is common precisely where power is being asserted or resisted — in army training, courtroom cross-examination, parliamentary exchange and confrontational broadcast interviews — which makes Culpeper's framework valuable for analysing how dominance is performed, not merely assumed.
The most granular level at which power operates is the management of talk itself. Erving Goffman, beyond his work on face, introduced the concept of footing — the alignment a speaker takes up to others and to their own utterance. A more powerful participant can shift footing at will (moving from formal to teasing, from "we" to "you," from speaking as an individual to speaking "for the institution"), whereas a subordinate's footing is more constrained.
Several observable features signal the distribution of power in discourse, and examiners reward candidates who name them precisely:
Key Definition: A face-threatening act (FTA) is any utterance that risks damaging a participant's face. Bald-on-record delivery (no mitigation) is available chiefly to the powerful; subordinates must "go off record" or pay with politeness. Tracking who mitigates and who does not is one of the surest routes to identifying a power asymmetry in transcript data.
A further analytical pairing is constraints versus obligations, drawn from Fairclough. Powerful participants impose constraints (on the content others may raise, the relations they may claim, and the subject positions they may occupy) and place obligations on subordinates (to answer, to address them by title, to wait their turn). Reading a transcript for who constrains and who is obliged is a reliable way to anatomise an unequal encounter.
Institutional talk concentrates power in particularly visible ways, which is why it appears so often as exam data. In the courtroom, the barrister exercises power in discourse through tightly controlled question types: closed and leading questions ("You were at the scene at midnight, weren't you?") constrain the witness to confirmation or denial, while declarative questions smuggle assertions into the record. The witness, by contrast, is obliged to answer and may be cut off; the judge controls the entire frame. Behind all of this sits power behind discourse — the legal system that decides what counts as admissible evidence and credible testimony in the first place.
The doctor–patient consultation, the job interview, the classroom and the police interview are the other canonical unequal encounters. In each, one party controls topic, turn allocation and question type, and the asymmetry is reproduced in small lexical and grammatical choices — modality, naming, mitigation. Recognising the genre of an unequal encounter, and predicting its characteristic features, is a strong opening move in any analysis.
Advertising is the purest commercial instance of influential power: it uses language not merely to inform but to shape desire, manufacture need and construct identity. Its recurrent features include:
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