The Exercise of Power in Communication ― Devices, Reception and Reaction

Power Exercise explores the various choices speakers or communicators make when expressing power relations in modern societies. The volume brings together several disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, communication studies and social psychology, to give insight into how interactants co-construct different aspects of power in their everyday life. The chapters reveal that the power potential of linguistic elements is dependent on context and is by no means fixed or predetermined, which provides implications for research methodology.

Rainer Schulze teaches English Linguistics at the Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany. He has published in the areas of cognitive linguistics, frame semantics and neo-Firthian linguistics, including corpus linguistics. He has edited and co-edited Making Meaningful Choices in English: On Dimensions, Perspectives, Methodology and Evidence (1998), Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface (2009, with Ute Romer), Patterns, Meaningful Units and Specialized Discourses ( 2010, with Ute Romer) and The Expression of Inequality in Interaction: Power, Dominance, and Status (2014, with Hanna Pishwa).

Hanna Pishwa has taught English and general linguistics at several universities, most recently in Berlin. She is interested in the interaction between cognition, social aspects and language. Her publications in this area include Language and memory: Aspects of Knowledge Representation and Language and Social Cognition: Expression of the Social Mind.