Abstract
Power, as a complex phenomenon permeating human life and social interaction, occupies a crucial position in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The importance of power relations in communication has been documented by researchers and scholars of various persuasions (e.g. Barnes, 1988; Connell, 1987; Jing, 1996; Le, 2010; Locher, 2004; Meusburger et al., 2015; Wartenberg, 1991; Watts, 1991) who approach power from various perspectives, from sociology to pragmatics and communication studies. The volume reviewed here aims to explore and reveal how power is expressed, perceived, interpreted and reacted to – largely with a focus on political contexts. This book is a most welcome contribution to the growing literature on power by showcasing the diverse and complex manifestations of power/powerlessness in multifarious communicative settings and institutional contexts.
Chapter 1 is an introduction, where the editors, Hanna Pishwa and Rainer Schulze, outline the book’s goals, objects of study, theoretical approaches and analytical frames, before presenting a helpful summary of the following 12 chapters that are divided into four parts: ‘Social Aspects of the Exercise of Power in Linguistics’ (Part I, two chapters), ‘Linguistic Cues for the Exercise of Power and Persuasion’ (Part II, three chapters), ‘Linguistic Elements and Their Influence on the Recipient’ (Part III, four chapters) and ‘Focus on the Influence of Powerful Messages and Reactions’ (Part IV, three chapters).
In Part I, two chapters address social aspects. In Chapter 2, ‘The significance of “the Social” in contemporary linguistics’, Rainer Schulze reviews three influential research strands, namely, Cognitive Grammar, Frame Semantics and Neo-Firthian Linguistics, arguing that language and grammar are intrinsically social. Schulze then scrutinises lexical realisation and co-selection patterns of verbal BROOK in a 450-million word corpus, claiming that inferring ‘the social’ from large corpus data is both possible and necessary. Chapter 3, ‘Meaning ruptures and meaningful eruptions in the service of rhetoric: Populist flare-up hits the Greek political pitch’, contributed by Eliza Kitis and E. Dimitris Kitis, details – with the help of a corpus linguistic methodology – how the term ‘populism’ can develop ‘totally inverted and subverted’ (p. 79) meanings in the Greek political arena and be appropriated by politicians as a powerful weapon in realising political goals.
Linguistic devices for the expression of power are the focus of Part II. In Chapter 4, ‘Power under the veil of democracy’, Anders Hougaard focuses on question and answer sessions at regional board meetings in Southern Denmark, elaborating how citizens – ‘officially’ encouraged to exercise power and obtain influence by asking politicians questions – end up in frustration, disappointment and even rage. It is found that power can be built into the formal structure of social practice, that those in power are only formally polite and nice, but in reality ‘arrogant’ (p. 99) in making their superior position ‘untouchable’, and that the phenomenon of ‘inference reversal’ may reverse the standard and positive meanings or implicatures of certain terms like ‘citizen’ and ‘regular’, or even the ‘thank you’ formula. Chapter 5, ‘Information source as persuasive power in political interviews: The case of Obama’, contributed by Hanna Pishwa, presents a qualitative comparison of two interviews with US President Barrack Obama in terms of evidentiality and epistimicity, arguing that the audience the interviews address, the topic under discussion and the style of the interviewer can affect, if not determine, the use of expressions of information source. In Chapter 6, ‘Using language as a weapon: Verbal manifestations of contemporary anti-semitism’, Monika Schwarz-Friesel presents both quantitative and qualitative findings of a longitudinal corpus study, demonstrating that verbal anti-semitism, ‘based on a mental system of fixed stereotypical representations’ (p. 177), is a kind of mental violence, and that explicit and implicit forms of devaluation and discrimination contribute to the persistent demonisation of Jews.
Part III explores the influence of linguistic elements of power on the recipient. In Chapter 7, ‘Gender, power and the human voice’, Alexandra Suppes reviews research results on how and why men and women are pragmatically, culturally and contextually different in voice, highlighting that the pitch, variation and clarity of voice may have no small influence on the production and perception of status, power and dominance. Traci Craig, Kevin L. Blankenship and Annie Lewis contribute Chapter 8, ‘Leveraging processing to understand linguistic cues, power and persuasion’. Guided by common dual- and multi-process models, the authors argue that various linguistic cues and styles (including rhetorical questions, tag questions and linguistic extremity markers) can convey information about power dynamics. However, this chapter lacks convincing examples that would support the authors’ arguments. In Chapter 9, ‘Powerful and powerless speech styles and their relationship to perceived dominance and control’, Lawrence Hosman takes stock of molar and molecular approaches to the exploration of how language features and perceptions of control, power and dominance are closely related to each other. In Chapter 10, ‘Language intensity as an expression of power in political messages’, Mark A. Hamilton employs mathematical modelling and causal modelling to experiment with former US President George Bush’s Declaration of Hostilities against Iraq during the Gulf War, demonstrating that language intensity as indicated by emotion-eliciting lexical items does impact on topic, message and source evaluation, and that Information Processing Theory (McGuire, 1968) does predict and explain how and why intense language can be used to wield power in society.
The last part, Part IV, focuses on the influence of powerful messages and reactions. In Chapter 11, ‘Persuasion and psychological reactance: The effects of explicit, high-controlling language’, Claude H. Miller documents some recent research on how Psychological Reactance Theory (Brehm, 1966) can shed light upon the use of language with sensitive, reactant populations, arguing that greater reactance may result from greater explicit and controlling language. In Chapter 12, ‘Antidominance as a motive of low-power groups in conflict’, P.J. Henry analyses selected important texts on three different conflicts ranging across divergent cultures, groups and historical moments, pointing out that dominance-seeking is not the real motive of low-power groups in conflict and that expression of ambitions of domination may incur attack from a higher power group. Finally, in Chapter 13 (‘Understanding power in social context: How power relates to language and communication in line with responsibilities or opportunities’), Annika Scholl, Naomi Ellemers, Kai Sassenberg and Daan Scheepers adopt a social psychological approach, with the aim of showing that power affects the expression and perception of verbal and non-verbal cues in language and communication; that the social context determines or constrains how individuals construe power; and that the construal of power in terms of opportunity versus responsibility may relate to differences in the language and communication behaviour of power holders and of powerless people.
In sum, it can be said that most of the discussions in this volume are theoretically grounded, empirically supported and thought-provoking, which makes them conducive to further and more in-depth understanding of the very complex phenomenon of power that is at once social, cognitive, cultural and even psychological, calling for multidisciplinary or even transdisciplinary endeavours. The editors deserve credit for providing a multi- and cross-disciplinary volume on the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts of power that pervade human existence in general and institutional interactions in particular. This book throws further insight into the complexities of power relations in human communication and will be of great value to students of sociology, pragmatics, social psychology and communication studies.
However, what is missing from this collection is research on communication on the Internet. Given the fact that Internet-mediated interaction (e.g. Crystal, 2006; Kappas and Krämer, 2011; Yus, 2011) has become a ubiquitous and indispensable reality, a comprehensive investigation of power cannot afford to neglect this increasingly crucial area of inquiry. In addition, although most research has highlighted the dynamics of power in interaction, it pays to be reminded that predetermined, asymmetric power relations often constrain the extent or level of dynamics and that some so-called ‘dynamics’ may turn out to be the result of manipulation.