Contribution
Description: "You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!"
Shakespeare's Caliban is highly conscious of the enslaving power of language (McCrum, et al, 2002). Learning language from his masters, he who can but use it to curse has become the emblematic figure of the colonised subject in the essays and poetry of numerous writers (Warner, 2004). Delivering a paper entitled 'Language, Power, Fear' in Oxford a fortnight after the attack on the World Trade Centre, Warner (2001) attested that "above all, a language embodies power, reproduces positions of authority, and subordination. To impose a language, or to forbid a language, represents a tyrant's first move". For Coates (1993) "power relations are reproduced through talk". Contemporaneous debate has made much of the language/power dialectic. Consequently, there is little disagreement that language and politics are similarly connected (Holborrow, 1999). As Holborrow points out, the contentious issue has caught the attention of theorists from both sides of the spectrum, with traditionalists claiming that language itself stands free-floating above politics yet at the same time considering attitudes to language as intensely political. At the other end, postmodernists and others see language as the nucleus of political life, steeped in power and defining peoples' role in the world. For Fairclough (1995), the problematic of language and power is "fundamentally a question of democracy" where discourse (language defined as a type of social practice) is shaped by relations of power, and invested with ideologies (Fairclough, 1992). Van Diyk (1998) argues that it is through discourse that the other semiotic practices that ideologies are formulated, reproduced and reinforced.
This paper will explore Pecheux (1982), Candlin (1997), Jaworski (1999) and other theorists' ideas that societies are organised through their ideological struggles; that particular groups (for example, social class groups) will be either more or less privileged in their access to particular discourse networks, where discourse is seen as a means both which constructs and is constructed by a set of social practices and in doing so both reproduces and constructs particular social-discourse practices constrained or encouraged by more macro movements in the over-arching formations. Particular attention will be paid to the implications of such ideologies as they impinge upon the education system.
Methodology: This paper will involve a detailed literature review of the areas and theorists under consideration.
Conclusions: "The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world" (Wittgenstein, 1953)
Reimer (1971) is concerned with the central role of language in society and its potential power "People understand the world by means of language… But language is used … to obscure and to distort reality as well as to render it lucid. … A minimum breadth of language skill is necessary in order to protect one's interest in the world; to understand one's situation well enough to act upon it significantly …" (Reimer, 1971). More recently theorists argue that people experiencing socio-economic disadvantage are further disempowered by their inability to participate in the linguistic processes and subsequent exercise of power (see Mackie, 1980; McClaren and Mayo, 1999; Moshenberg, 1988; Freire, 1974, 1979, 1987).
This paper will investigate the fact that not all people share the same cultural and historical mode of language use and it seeks to draw conclusions on the associative implications for individuals as they operate within both the education system and wider society.
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