A comprehensive textbook, Psychology of Language examines both the formal/structural aspects of linguistics and psycholinguistics and the concerns of sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and social semiotics. In a clear and lively presentation, author Michael A. Forrester discusses three levels of communication: Thinking, the cognitive processes of self-communication; Talk, with an emphasis on everyday conversational behavior; Text, including the study of reading and writing
Within these areas, Forrester introduces a wide range of subjects, from language structure, semantics, and deixis to conversation, power relations in language, interpretation, and postmodern psychology.
Thorough and informative, Psychology of Language provides students of linguistics, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, and social psychology with a critical overview that integrates diverse themes.
Chapter 7: Power Relations in Language
Power Relations in Language
Power in Conversational Contexts
The small group of sociologists who helped shape the emergence of CA were dissatisfied with their contemporaries during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were unhappy with the heavily laden assumptions of quantitative methodology and the excessive formalism they found in linguistics and psycholinguistics. Ethnomethodology offered an alternative to the positivist leanings of language research, particularly through the adoption of principles of accountability and intersubjectivity. Conversation could simply be studied for ‘what it is’ and approached in an apparently atheoretical fashion. The people involved in the study of talk (the subjects) would themselves validate the data underpinning any analysis of models, processes or procedures said to be in play. However, as we noted earlier, ...