Language and occupation Flashcards
Shan Wareing
Shân Wareing observed that there are different types of power:
Political power, which is power held by people in authority, for example, politicians or the police.
Personal power, where the power arises from someone’s occupation or position in society, for example, a manager or a teacher.
Social group power, where power comes from social factors, such as your gender, ethnicity, class or age.
These types of power can then be divided further:
Instrumental power is authoritative power held by someone due to the position they hold. So, for example, consider how politicians or headteachers have to use language to maintain or administer authority.
Influential power arises from a need to gain more power. The person using this type of power may not have it already, and thus uses language to persuade or influence other people. Consider how power might be used in advertising or the media, especially in how influencers use language on social media.
Norman Fairclough
critical discourse analysis - how language can be analysed in order to recognise how power is being used to persuade or influence.
an unequal encounter between two speakers, or between a reader and a text, occurs due to power structures in society. Fairclough argued that there are dominant and dominated classes in a capitalist society, e.g. the dominant owners of a company and the dominated workers who work for that company.
When we look at how power is manifested in the language itself, we can call it power in discourse. Whereas power behind discourse relates to the sociological and ideological factors behind the power being asserted.
Another useful term is that of synthetic personalisation. This means that a text is simulating someone addressing you personally or individually. It is a technique widely used in advertising.
Erving Goffman
The idea of face arises from the belief that people have to take part in a variety of social encounters throughout their lives. These require an individual to use a pattern of verbal and non-verbal gestures which allow the person to express appreciation to those around them.
So, a person’s face refers to the way in which they conduct themselves according to these gestures within a particular environment.
In a nutshell, we generally know and anticipate how we should behave in social situations and we wear a type of ‘mask’ to do, which means that we do not articulate every single thought or feeling we may have due to respecting the social setting.
Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson
Use in a paragraph with Goffman
They divided the idea of ‘face’ into two parts:
Positive face reflects someone’s desire to be liked and appreciated.
Negative face reflects someone’s desire to protect their personal rights, such as freedom of speech and action.
This then creates different ideas of politeness: positive and negative politeness.
Positive politeness is where we appeal to a person’s positive face, which makes us feel good about ourselves.
Negative politeness is where we try to mitigate any potential issues which might arise as a result of imposing on someone.
Brown and Levinson also wrote about face-threatening acts.
Face-threatening acts are utterances which might threaten or damage someone’s face needs and self-esteem. These can be verbal, paraverbal (meaning they come across in pitch or inflection) or non-verbal (body language).
FTAs may threaten either positive or negative face.
Howard Giles
Giles argued that speakers modify their language to sound more like others when they wanted to forge a closer relationship. This is what is known as convergence.
Divergence, on the other hand, occurs when someone wishes to exaggerate the differences between their speech and that of their audience or participant.
We can also categorise convergence and divergence further.
Upwards convergence reflects a person’s attempts to attach more prestige (status or class) to their speech style. Downwards convergence would involve the person downplaying the prestige of their speech.
Similarly, upwards divergence reflects a person’s attempts to accentuate the prestige in their speech to distance themselves from the other participant, whereas downwards divergence would suggest a person is trying to exaggerate a less prestigious accent or mode of communication for the same reason.
So how does this link to power and occupation? Well, within society, hierarchies exist within organisations and even between individuals, and we can adapt our speech style to lessen or create distance within these structures.
Drew and Heritage
They proposed the idea of institutional interaction where people within a particular occupational group or workplace use common language which contribute to a shared goal.
Within this interaction are inferential frameworks which reflect knowledge about that workplace which is built up over time. This makes it easier to communicate swiftly.
John Swales
John Swales broke down the idea of a discourse community, which is a group of people who regularly take part in discourse, sharing communication. This doesn’t have to be spoken communication but could take the form of, for example, technological communication.
He argued that a discourse community has six characteristics:
It has common goals
There is intercommunication between its members (e.g. internal emails)
It has multiple genres of communication, e.g. emails, speeches, conversations, etc
It provides information and feedback in order to attain successful communication
It contains specialist lexis, e.g. jargon, or specialist vocabulary specific to a profession
It contains members with relevant knowledge or experience, and newcomers must acquire an appropriate level of experience in order to be accepted
Paul Grice
Grice outlined his Cooperative Principle, where when communicating, we will be conversationally cooperative in order to achieve mutual conversational ends.
Within this principle, he argued that there are four maxims, or rules of conversation:
Maxim of quantity: use an appropriate amount of information – neither too much not too little
Maxim of quality: the speech should be truthful
Maxim of relevance: the conversation should stay on topic and be relevant
Maxim of manner: communication should be effective in its clarity and appropriateness
Grice argued that we can both violate (break it in a covert way which is not obvious) and flout (break it in a way that is obvious) these maxims.
Koester
One of the key terms to arise is that of phatic talk which is essentially small talk: social and interactional talk which is designed to maintain and develop relationships with coworkers.
Another key term is transactional talk, which refers to interactions which have a purpose, including those which relate to work-specific goals.
Koester concluded that phatic talk is actually as important as transactional talk in achieving workplace goals.
