Language and Power

Influential power – persuasive. It inclines us or makes us want to behave in certain ways or adopt opinions or attitudes, with obvious force.

Instrumental power – explicit power of the sort imposed by the state, by its laws and conventions, or by the organizations for which we work.

Implicature - used to persuade people to take something for granted which is actually open for debate/ forces the audience to agree with the politician, e.g. ‘we are fighting for a fairer Britain’.

Synonymous parallelism – adding something extra/repeating the same idea in different wording.

Antithetical parallelism – adding an opposing thought

Negative Face (according to Brown and Levinson) – we…