Review of Lynne Young, Michael Fitzgerald and Saira Fitzgerald The Power of Language: How
discourse influences society (2nd ed.) Sheffield: Equinox, 2018. 381pp
Alexandra I. García Marrugo
The Power of Language: How discourse influences society is a well-scaffolded introduction to the
study of ‘the role of the role of language in producing and maintaining powerful relations’ (p. 1)
combining a CDA perspective with SFL based analysis. Targeting a novice audience in a tertiary
educational setting, the volume gradually builds on SFL concepts extending beyond the
frequently used nominalization and agent deletion to include Mood and modality, lexical
cohesion, Theme, and parataxis, among many others. The grammatical analysis is used to inform
the answers to CDA analytical questions such as the power relations between participants, their
feelings, and intentions.
The book is comprised of nine chapters examining a wide range of registers – from political
speeches to multimodal news reports and Twitter feeds – and issues – from racism to the
commodification of education and climate change. With a clear pedagogical orientation, each
chapter is divided into four sections: practice, discussion, applications, and CDA questions. They
also include excerpts from scholars in the field in a section called ‘views from the theorists’,
which expand and/or explain theoretical concepts; examples of CDA or SFL analyses modelling
discussion of results; a glossary, defining the terms introduced in the chapter, and a useful
‘further readings’ section listing relevant sources.
The first three chapters focus on issues that are more political in nature including international
conflict, political fear, and racism. These issues are explored in world leaders’ speeches and
newspaper editorials. The first include familiar faces such as Barack Obama and Theresa May,
but also lesser-known figures such as the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta. They also include
less studied genres such as a race relations survey and a song by Bono. For the analysis, the
authors introduce categories from the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions such as
participant and process types and Mood types, providing a detailed enough but still accessible
explanation that serves as the basis for interpretation of the ideological content of the texts.
In chapter 4, the focus shifts from socio-political issues to the language of advertising, also
showing how this register expresses ideology and power. For this analysis, the authors resort to
categories from the textual metafunctions: Theme types and cohesion analysis including
identifying lexical chains. The chapter concludes with a suggestion for a hands-on activity where
students will have to construct their own ad using the strategic discourse features discussed.
Chapter 5 analyses the language of organizations including examples from both governmental
and private institutions from the local to the international level. It is in this chapter that the
schism between CDA and SFL, the relation between language and ideology, makes itself evident.
On the one hand, CDA scholars, most notably Fairclough who is cited over 20 times in the
volume, reject the idea that “all discourse is irredeemably ideological”(Fairclough, 2013: 67). On
the other, SFL conceives language and ideology as “inextricably intertwined” (Lukin, 2018: 16)
and that is because language “does not passively reflect but plays an active part […] in construing
human experience”(Halliday 2006). While elaborating further on the case for language being
always ideological is beyond the scope of this review1, it is evident that the assumption that some
discourses merely reflect unfiltered reality leads the authors to offer rather naïve interpretations
such as the following excerpt being presented as a ‘neutral view’ (p. 144) on the International
Monetary Fund:
“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) promotes international financial stability and
monetary cooperation. It also seeks to facilitate international trade, promote high
employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the globe”.
(p.145)
Chapter 6 explores what the authors call ‘modern trends’ in discourse, namely technicalization,
conversationalization, marketization, and globalization. They identify grammatical features such
as the use of nominalization, the absence of human actors, timeless present, and parataxis for the
first and the latter, the use of inclusive pronouns and repetition in the second, and the use of
second person pronoun and imperative mood for the third trend. What the analysis lacks, in my
view, is a discussion of context of situation, which is introduced only in chapter 7. For example,
the fact that the one of the excerpts analysed comes from a blog would account for the
conversationalization features identified. Likewise, identifying the audience for Bush’s speech as
primary students, parents, and teachers can explain the “appropriation of the discourse practices
of ordinary life in public domains” (Fairclough & Mauranen 1997): 91 cited on p. 198).
Chapter 7 focuses on spoken language, using as samples for analysis excerpts from casual
conversation, a political interview, and courtroom interrogation. The introduction of the
variables of field, tenor, and mode for the analyses in this chapter make a more explicit link
between specific grammatical selections – in mood and modality, for example – and the context
of situation, which in turn helps answer questions about power. The chapter also expands on the
categories of modality and introduces Appraisal theory. Overall, this chapter does a better job at
integrating the CDA perspective with SFL theory.
Chapter 8 starts with a comparison of different frameworks to analyse multimodal
communication, namely those of Lemke, Kress and van Leeuwen’s, and O’Toole. It draws on
various categories from these frameworks to explore news stories – including their accompanying
photographs - and websites. Here, the authors expand their analyses to include not only the
context of situation, but also the context of culture. Furthermore, rather than examining the
visual and the linguistic component, the authors illustrate how each influences the other.
The final chapter turns to social media, examining NASA’s Twitterfeed and online comments on
a news site. NASA’s tweets are used to exemplify Positive Discourse Analysis. While the content
of the tweets is rather benign, I disagree with their appreciation that they don’t involve hidden
power. While the motivation of beating the USSR at the space race has disappeared, the
discourse of American exceptionalism, and the purposes of colonization and exploitation of
resources remains intact (Billings 2007). NASA’s tweets are not merely informing or educating
the public. They are reinforcing the idea of American colonists spreading Western values
throughout the universe as a desirable goal. The apparently obvious positive values of space
exploration can be seen in a different light when we take into account the goals expressed by
NASA administrator Michael Griffin: “when human civilization reaches the point where more
people are living off earth than on it, we want their culture to be Western.” (cited in Billings,
2007: 494).
The Power of Language can be an effective pedagogical resource to introduce tertiary students to a
systematic approach to analyse unequal relations perpetuated by discourse. CDA practitioners
could benefit as they may expand and strengthen their linguistic analysis toolkit. As a systemicist,
however, I find problematic using SFL concepts as simply a methodological tool without
considering its main tenet: that language construes human experience and is therefore, inevitably
ideological.
1
See Lukin (2018) for a review and critique of the different positions on the relation between language and
ideology in linguistics.
References
Billings, Linda. 2007. Overview: Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight—Evolution of a Cultural Narrative. In
Steven J. Dick & Roger D. Launius (eds.), Societal Impact of spaceflight, 483–500. NASA.
https://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-chapter25.pdf (13 November, 2020).
Fairclough, Norman. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman & Anna Mauranen. 1997. The conversationalisation of political discourse: A
comparative view. In J Blommaert & C Bulcaen (eds.), Political Linguistics, 89–119. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins & Son. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/bjl.11.06fai (26
November, 2020).
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 2006. On Language and Linguistics (Collected Works). A&C Black.
Lukin, Annabelle. 2018. War and its ideologies: a social-semiotic theory and description. New York, NY:
Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
