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Language Ideology And Power Rhetorical Analysis

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Language, Ideology and Power Essay Institutions have the power to foster particular kinds of identities to suit their own purposes. With reference to one or more institutional contexts, explain how power materialises in discourses. Introduction Language is the fundamental persuasive device. When we speak, we do not simply speak words but we discursively produce social identities, ideologies and power relations. This idea that language harnesses the performative power to construct ideological meanings and power structures in social contexts introduces the concept of discourse. Discourses are particularly slippery to define; according to Structuralist theories discourse is “language above the line” (Stubbs, 1983:1), that being, discourses …show more content…

Instead, adopting a Conversational Analysis approach, this essay is concerned with Political interviews. Firstly, because of the contextualised formality that constitutes this as institutional discourse, and secondly, as the interview format exacerbates features of interaction (i.e. turn taking) that are not present in ordinary interaction. This essay will suggest the latter of the two. This essay will also posit the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions – what is it about institutional discourse that influences the ways people talk in it – with the ‘how’ question concerned with CA, that is, how power is enacted through communicative conduct i.e. turns at …show more content…

According to Halliday’s Systemic Functional Theory (Halliday, 1976), language is a resource speakers use to achieve communicative goals. Halliday suggests the context of situation comprises of three components: the field (the purpose of the interaction), the mode (the form the discourse takes) and tenor (the participants in the discourse and their relationships). Context has a myriad of implications for the production and comprehension of discourse. It refers to structures of text and talk in a communicative situation, including setting, genre, participant(s) roles, social and institutional, as well as speaker attitudes and ideologies. These elements are pertinent in interview interaction. The interviewer and the interviewee orientate their language strategically to confer their individual communicative goals. In a political context, an interviewer’s goal may be to covertly force an interviewee to admit deficiencies in their political stance/political ideologies. Conversely, the interviewee’s goal may be win the persuasion of the viewing public – disallowing for the kind of interaction that would be detrimental to his/her career. The news interview is a decidedly asymmetrical interaction. Characteristic of the news interview is the discursive roles that interviewer and interviewee obey and comply to. Generally speaking, we expect

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