Language, Power and Ideology

by Ruth Wodak (Editor)

The topic of Language and Ideology has increasingly gained importance in the linguistic sciences. The general aim of critical linguistics is the exploration of the mechanisms of power which establish inequality, through the systematic analysis of political discourse (written or oral). This reader contains papers on a variety of topics, all related to each other through explicit discussions on the notion of ideology from an interdisciplinary approach with illustrative analyses of texts from the media, newspapers, schoolbooks, pamphlets, talkshows, speeches concerning language policy in Nazi-Germany, in Italofascism, and also policies prevalent nowadays. Among the interesting subjects studied are the jargon of the student movement of 1968, speeches of politicians, racist and sexist discourse, and the language of the green movement. Because of the enormous influence of the media nowadays, the explicit analysis of the mechanisms of “manipulation”, “suggestion”, and “persuasion” inherent in language or about language behaviour and strategies of discourse are of social relevance and of interest to all scholars of social sciences, to readers in all educational institutions, to analysts of political discourse, and to critical readers at large.

Genres: Linguistics, Politics, Nonfiction

308 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[terka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Out of the 13 studies collected in this volume I have read only 7, because the others weren't relevant to my field of study. But out of these 7, only one was interesting. The others just kept repeating the blatantly obvious, to the point that I was amazed that the authors even felt the need to write it. The article about persuasion did not teach me anything new, neither did the manipulation in newspapers, etc. You don't even have to have any knowledge in the field and you'll already know the point of the studies by simply reading their title. Parts of some studies were just summaries of works by others, in one case the majority of the study was about work by Grice and others, contributing nothing new. The book was also plagued by typos and errors or random words appearing out of nowhere, probably as a result of shitty editing. The language was weird, the book being written mainly by Germans in English. Many studies supplied examples from German but either outright translated them or provided translations in the annex, except for one important definition (linguisticaly oriented definition of stereotypes) that was for some reason left in German with no translation whatsoever, which seems very odd in an otherwise completely English book. I had to hit up a German major friend to help me with that.
The only thing worthwhile was Teun van Dijk's study - although it doesn't bring anything new if you have read his book Discourse and Power before.
I don't usually rate non-fiction or textbooks but this one has left such a foul taste that I have to rate it...