Language and Power

This title offers an overview of the field of institutional discourse, introducing the key theorists. How language is used in institutions and the language of power are key concerns of both sociolinguistics and social theory. The ways in which individuals talk in institutional settings, is very different to their ordinary conversation, with different interplays of social interaction and relations of power. Institutional discourse also varies from other types of professional interaction. "Language and Power" provides students with an overview of the field of institutional discourse, introducing the key theorists including Foucault, Habermas, Weber, Giddens, Althusser and Gramsci, among others.The book covers a wide range of institutional contexts including the workplace, the media, prison, courtroom and academia. This diversity allows for a close examination of similarities and differences in institutional discourse practices and for a critical discussion of a range of approaches to the analysis of institutional discourse.The approaches examined here include: interactional sociolinguistics; ethnomethodology; conversation analysis; critical discourse analysis; and corpus-based analysis.
This readable and comprehensive introduction to language and power will be essential reading for students of sociolinguistics at undergraduate and postgraduate level."The Advances in Sociolinguistics" series seeks to provide a snapshot of the current diversity of the field of sociolinguistics and the blurring of the boundaries between sociolinguistics and other domains of study concerned with the role of language in society.