Learner Resource19‒Summary and checking your understanding

Norman Fairclough (2001) is key to exploring language and power and distinguishes different forms of power in texts: power in discourse and power behind discourse. At GCSE level, we tend to think about influential language in terms of rhetoric or persuasive devices – power in discourse.

  • Devices of rhetoric can be revised
  • Persuasive devices in Advertising Language can be revised, including Fairclough’s idea of synthetic personalisation.

At A level we are interested in looking through language at the ideological messages within language as much as their surface messages – power behind discourse.

Ideology is the attitudes, beliefs and values of a society. There can be dominant ones as well as competing ones even within one society.

EXTENSION: Althusser says that media texts (e.g. adverts) don’t just target a pre-existing target audience, they in fact create an ideal reader through interpellation.

EXTENSION: Stuart Hall says audiences are not passive though - we can read texts in the preferred way, but we can have oppositional readings to the meanings encoded in texts or negotiated readings.

Media texts (such as adverts and news) use narrative to draw us in and connect us with common stories in our culture (cultural myths).

These often use simplified binary oppositions which simplify complex events or human experiences

It can be argued that factual (informational) texts are more problematic as we expect these sorts of texts to be factual, objective and unbiased.

EXTENSION: Jacques Derrida said that one of the binary oppositions is always viewed more positively than the other in our society as a result of the dominant ideology that prevails. (e.g.: male/female binaries)

News uses these to simplify complex stories. It selects one narrative and uses binary oppositions us/them (the other) which are reproduced until we believe it is the ‘only’ story about the world or way of looking.

Antonio Gramsci suggested that this is how hegemony works – the way that the status quo in society is maintained – that powerful elites remain powerful.

Version 11© OCR 2017

Linguistic variations of power

This simplification occurs through language and language may influence thought.

There is a debate around two positions – linguistic reflectionism and linguistic determinism.

  • Linguistic Reflectionism says that language simply reflects the needs, views and opinions of its users. The argument is that to change language you need to change attitudes.
  • Linguistic Determinism (associated with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) says that language controls our perceptions of reality influencing us to think in certain ways. The argument is that to change attitude we need to change language.
  • Nowadays this is seen as too strong a claim so a weaker version of the same idea has emerged called linguistic relativity which claims that language exerts a powerful influence over how we think and behave.

So when we create or read texts we should pay close attention to the labels used to name (nouns/names) and describe (adjectives/adverbs) and always question common collocations in order to understand the power behind discourse and whose world view the labels and adjectives support.

When thinking about power in language, we need to consider representations of power as well as how the text itself is powerful or authoritative or persuasive.

Version 11© OCR 2017

Linguistic variations of power