Introduction
Language is a method for exchanging information in societal structure. Conversation internalization is described through the linguistic structure. Through language, people maintain their society’s heritage, culture, value, memory, unique forms of reasoning, purpose, and manifestation. Social justice preservation, effective leadership, resolution of conflicts, rehabilitation, and ecological sustainability depends on discourse. Individuals’ ability to articulate themselves through spoken language allows them to address many demands. They employ communication skills to express concerns that present them with precise knowledge in the form of fundamental necessities.
The conversation describes the situation, personalities, and thoughts of people. Vocal communication is critical for connecting individuals and forming relationships (Wróblewska, 2021). Language affects and perpetuates societal ideals and biases and is a powerful resource for maintaining inequality. In contrast, “some phrases” can make individuals sensitive and seem threatened, which can be disruptive and contribute to emotions of interpersonal disconnection. Instances exist on blogs, social networking sites, and television shows. The objective of this research is on the connection between language, authority, and interpersonal interactions. Their transition from asserting its validity to investigating and grasping its foundations and ramifications. Most linguists today acknowledge that language and authority have a symbiotic relationship.
Class Authority
Prominent organizations and individuals employ language to both establish and sustain their authority. As a result, language emerges crucial for the sustainability of authority, and language’s influence and effectiveness are subject to the control of persons and organizations. This validates the theory that authority is gained and maintained not only through intimidation but also through covert methods (Wróblewska, M. N., 2021). Diverse forms of authority interactions exist, such as those between families, and literate and illiterate individuals, in addition to formal authority, which is practiced by institutions that are officially acknowledged for maintaining a level of leadership, for instance, the military.
Class Authority Ramifications: Individual
For instance, in a hypermasculine household, a father does not use strength to enforce his control over the other family members. Contemplate the following excerpt from African American author August Wilson’s playwright, Fences:
- Troy: You suppose to keep up with your chores and hold that job down at the A&P. Ain’t been around here all day on a Saturday. Ain’t none of your chores done, and now you telling me you’re done quit your job.
- Cory: I’m gonna be working weekends.
- Troy: You damn right you are! And ain’t any need for nobody coming around here to talk to me about signing nothing.
- Cory: Hey, Pop… you can’t do that. He’s coming all the way from North Carolina.
- Troy: I don’t care where he is coming from. The white man ain’t gonna let you get nowhere with that football no way. You go on and get your book learning so you can work yourself up in that A&P or learn how to fix cars or build houses or something, get you a trade. That way you have something can’t nobody take away from you. You go on and learn how to put your hands to some good use besides hauling people’s garbage.
- Cory: I get good grades, Pop. That’s why the recruiter wants to talk with you. You got to keep up your grades to get recruited. This way I’ll be going to college…
- Troy: First you gonna get your butt down there to the A&P and get your job back
In this short dialogue, the father asserts his authority over his son. The writer’s exclusion of any linguistic connection to the father’s use of authority while speaking to his son indicates that he does not use force when speaking to him. In this contrast, the father addresses his son directly, strictly. The example’s conversational manner is weighted with power and authority, given that the dialogue happens within a family institution, with the father, as the dominant figure. The preceding example backs up Wróblewska’s (2021) argument that authority dynamics are not class-bound and, therefore, can be reflected through language in socialization. According to other researchers, such as Fowler et al. (2018), authority can be generated and sustained through communication. These researchers contend that language and conversation are used to establish and alter authority conceptions in societal structure.
Class Authority Ramifications: Societal
Organizations and individuals can change social norms and perceptions through their ideological construction of authority. The manner organizations and individuals employ language to structure and enhance their discursive aspirations or maintain their authority above other organizations and individuals (Ellis, 2019). Impacts interpersonal interactions, such as husband and wife, and cultural structures, such as how somebody works. In contrast, an uninformed individual who is accustomed frequently to digital content that employs language to advocate authoritarian concepts is prone to be affected by particular views and may, as a result, apply similar ideas through their private married relationship. In this instance, social media can serve political ideals that may be related to a dominating society (Ellis, 2019). As a result, many media platforms employ language to influence people’s perspectives of and feelings about their socioeconomic activities and interaction. Wróblewska (2021), Fowler et al. (2018), and Kyratzis (2021) all acknowledge that language is “a sociological phenomenon” and that authority is formed and maintained through patriarchal and unequal social relationships.
Therefore, in the case of authority interactions, one may well distinguish between two types of linguistic usages: language as political dialogue and language as personal dialogue. The first relates to the discourse used among influential government agencies in the mainstream press. Authorities and politicians commonly exert control through this explicit use of language. By disseminating information concerning the societal structure and propagating a particular sociological phenomenon, these dominant organizations employ language or public debate to establish and maintain their domination (Ellis, 2019). The media, for instance, uses a range of strategies to influence public perceptions and attitudes toward a particular societal issue.
Fowler et al. (2018) outline a guideline that contextual language learners could use to examine the roles language provides in the setting of authority dynamics. Transitivity is a significant aspect mentioned in their set of guidelines for types of construction. It describes the manner information is expressed in a phrase. For example, in the print medium, transitivity patterns are not randomly chosen. They convey an expressive function, as evidenced by the unique way media headlines, for instance, present the same incidents except with slight variation and motivations. The following are headings from two independent United states daily newspapers that cover the same story:
- The New York Times – One Village at a Time: The Grinding Artillery War in Ukraine
- The Washington Post – The War in Ukraine, as Seen on Russian TV
Every headline clearly describes the very same incidents. The manner contributors for every statement are constructed. The phrases selected to record the event are instances of how language is utilized variably to encourage or involve various goals and outcomes of transitivity construction.
The headline of the New York Times was structured in such a manner that the audience would perceive that “The Grinding Artillery War” was the source of operations in the incident. The Washington Post, on the other side, constructed its headline in a manner that the source of action is The War in Ukraine, instead of “The Grinding Artillery War,” as The New York Times published. Even though the two newspapers cover a similar incident, the headline variation is not coincidental. This change in attention epitomizes Foucault’s concept of language, which is the process of constructing information and existence (Ellis, 2019). Language authority is demonstrated by the disparity in how discourse creates realities. Apart from political dialogue, which is one method of organizations and individuals constructing and maintaining control, personal discourse is another method. Harding and Cortés (2018) describe interpersonal conversation as the language used among people in their relations. Private conversation, including civil debate, is another mechanism for people to preserve power dynamics. The authority and credibility of this form of conversation are acquired from the social positions that people possess in their community.
Physician-patient encounters are such instances of confidential dialogue manifesting in social connections. Examine, for example, the following explanation:
- Doctor: You are suffering from post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis.
- Patient: (to Therapist): What does he mean that I have post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis?
- Therapist: This is an inflammatory condition of the kidney’s small filtrations known as the glomerulus. It can occur a week or more after recovering from a painful respiratory infection or, in exceptional situations, a streptococcal bacteria-related epidermis condition.
- Patient: Was that hard for him to say?
This passage from a physician-patient encounter depicts how interactants’ authority relationships are maintained through confidential dialogue. To describe the Patient’s medical situation, the Physician uses extremely specialized terminology representing his knowledge areas. The Physician might have explained the Patient’s medical status using the same language as the Therapist. On the other hand, the Physician prefers a language that is not understandable to the patient. This is evident from the Patient’s reactions that the Patients’ understanding of the practice of medicine is substandard.
The discourse used by the Physician in the passage is also not coincidental. At the very lowest, the Physician should remember that the Patient is a client, not a medical partner. The Physician’s expressive approach suggests inequality and a willingness to sustain a physician-patient boundary. On the other hand, the therapist effectively implies that the Physician’s language is incomprehensible to the Patient and consequently employs a more coherent narrative. As a result, we might conclude that the Therapist is unconcerned with sustaining an authority connected with the Patient (Ellis, 2019). She switches to an interactional discourse style intended to foster comprehension instead of supporting authority.
To summarize, various discursive expressions of authority have been addressed in this study. Several social encounters have highlighted Wróblewska’s (2021) theory that the correlation involving “language and authority” is exhibited beyond class conflict. As a result, authority is maintained both through punitive measures and discursive norms such as language and discourse. People use private discourse to build and strengthen their authority connections with several other people, while organizations employ public discourse to execute authority and privilege.
Racism
According to new Stanford research, authorities regularly use less polite language with local black residents than with local white residents during the first comprehensive review of their body-worn camera recordings (Camp et al., 2021). Even after the researchers considered the police’s ethnicity, the degree of the transgression and the position and consequence of the encounter, ethnic inequalities in civil discourse persisted. An interdisciplinary team from Stanford’s sociology, languages, and information science departments initially introduced an artificially intelligent system for detecting the degree of respect in police discourse before analyzing the security footage.
Ethnic Authority Ramifications
The research team subsequently used this method to analyze the recordings of 981 police interactions performed by the Alameda Law Enforcement agency in a month. During the last few decades, the American community has been shocked by torrent videotapes of police officers using excessive force on black people. The footage from such incidents is frightening, revealing, and inciting authorities’ confrontations across Oklahoma, Carolina, Ohio, Maryland, New York, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois, among other places (Camp et al., 2021). These pictures have reignited debate over contemporary racial issues, prompting many to wonder how far we have progressed. Police agencies are rapidly embracing body-worn cams to encourage responsibility and honesty.
Despite the fast adoption of body-worn cams, no police agency has thoroughly analyzed these camera systems’ enormous collections of information. Instead, society and government organizations prefer to look at the small percentage of recordings that causes higher incidences, using the footage to prove the accused of a crime in particular interactions. Blacks have had more unpleasant encounters with police than other ethnic communities. According to multiple studies, authorities handle blacks less equitably and professionally than whites in their interactions with them (Camp et al., 2021). Regarding the assassination of George Floyd, an African-American citizen in Minneapolis who was arrested by the police, including one who squatted on his throat for almost 8 minutes, thousands of individuals flocked to the streets protesting systemic racism and demanding reforms. Police worried about seeming racist admitted to experiencing less trust in their legitimate superiority, which led to higher approval for utilizing aggressive enforcement while on duty.
According to the findings, seniority was also a powerful indicator of acceptance for appropriate use of power, with experienced police reporting more self-confidence and much less sympathy for aggressive regulation than junior police (Camp et al., 2021). Stereotyping is regrettably typical and habitual. People use subconscious biases, which sociologists call heuristics, to construct meaning around each other. The cognitive process is among strategies in which individuals develop seeing the reality primarily based on assumptions they draw from the existing knowledge. Most Americans, in contrast, have been accustomed to unfavorable images of Arabs and Muslims in the news and commentary, leading them to generalize them as extremists or terrorists. Traditionally, black males have experienced the same incident. According to research, people are more prone to regard black males as thieves because they are repeatedly accustomed to depicting them as criminals (Camp et al., 2021). Bringing awareness to knowledge and images contradicting prejudices can help individuals change their minds. As protests against police brutality flare across the United States, this is an excellent time to consider what we can do better to look past our preconceptions.
Gender Inequality
The gender equity debate has inspired a comprehensive study into women’s sports participation and empowerment. According to new Veliz et al. (2020) findings, phrases that set one gender as the baseline for the other might unconsciously propagate inequalities. While the words “girls are as talented as boys at sports” are intended to be encouraging, they can ultimately fail. Although well-intentioned, comments made by families and educators can inadvertently reinforce the preconceptions they are attempting to eradicate. The remark appears to suggest that both genders have equal abilities.
Gender Authority Ramifications
However, due to its linguistic structures, boys are much more likely than girls to prosper in sports. The distinction between “girls are as talented as boys in sports” and “Girls and boys are equally talented at sports” could be subtle, but each has a distinct meaning. The first statement includes a subject-complement construction that contrasts girls and boys. “Boys” serves as a compliment or a baseline upon which “girls,” the subject, are assessed. Linguistic scholars also use this pattern to contrast one item with another, which is more regular or widespread (Fowler et al. 2018). The second statement uses a subject-verb form and incorporates both girls and boys in the same message without equating them.
Despite the fact that some people claim that girls must not be allowed to compete in the same sports as boys, their training prowess is not exceptional. Girls, on the other hand, have more essential learning abilities and talents. Girls and boys should be able to participate in the same sports because they must have equal opportunities. When events such as American football, skating, soccer, and volleyball are organized, boys almost invariably dominate. Girls are not permitted to participate in any professional or junior tournament, even if they are mentally and physically qualified to train in these activities.
Most trainers and families feel athletics is very rough, despite the fact that some girls enjoy participating in such exercises. Girls’ rugby is also gaining popularity, yet it is anticipated that only 40% of sportspersons will be female by 2026 (Veliz et al.,2020). The cognitive capacities of girls are quite decent, and they have been withdrawn from them for an extended period. Simply because they are of opposite sexes and men are “stronger and more powerful” does not imply that they are superior. Girls are proven to concentrate more in school and learn better than boys due to their learning approach. Girls’ learning methods are quicker, and they are more concerned with their tasks. Boys are prone to slacking off and prefer playing around and enjoying rather than learning (Veliz et al., 2020). This indicates that girls can adopt the same athletics as boys.
Most women are robust, and most sports require athleticism; they do not need to be perfect for this role on a boys’ team. Activists can assist girls by persuading school administrators and other notable sports figures to permit them to compete on men sports leagues. They could also hand out leaflets, blogs, and publications explaining why females should be permitted to train with boys. When one looks at contemporary and well-known soccer documentaries, one will observe that they all feature a complete boys’ squad and solely girls as cheerleaders. This is an important subject that cannot be overlooked. However, some reports indicate that girls should be allowed to take part in athletics with boys. Some are skeptical and argue that existing practices must not be reversed (Veliz et al., 2020). Female athletes’ clothing is regularly scrutinized, yet nobody has claimed a baseball or soccer player’s shorts are too tight. Female Olympians were punished for not wearing bikini bottoms rather than wearing pants.
A tournament official advised a female decathlete that her shorts were “extremely short and indecent.” Frustrated from being objectified, Olympic female gymnasts chose filled-to-the-brim leotards over bikini-cut ones (Veliz et al., 2020). Gender expectations and a lack of female trainers as mentors are the primary reasons girls leave or do not play sports. The median age at which children begin athletics is six years old, demanding considerable parental engagement. If parents think boys are preferable to girls, they may assign girls to a different exercise or refrain from participating in sports entirely.
According to Veliz et al. (2020), several issues with sports in America are primarily about competitiveness, and other children want to play for fun. Who believes that children should be able to participate in sports until they finish school. Sports are the primary physical program for children since it prepares them for their future (Veliz et al., 2020). It is essential to consider grammatical structures that, when combined, can unconsciously impact individuals in some form or another. Researchers intend to conduct an extensive study into how much literature in the mainstream and other open discourse, both on the internet and in person, employs subject-complement statements that present males as the baseline upon which females are analyzed.
The way members of the social discourse concerning men and women demonstrate a common standard methodology for conventional duties and what is regarded as masculine or feminine. Linguistics is used to create and maintain this shared information (Fowler et al., 2018). Individuals are typically subjected to ideologies that depict preconceived stereotypes concerning their future opportunities and interests since childhood. As a result, men and women are perceived or constructed differently in these debates. This finding suggests how gender and authority interactions are conveyed using discourse targeted upon policymakers by their colleagues and the mainstream press and how typical ideologies produce gender and power inequalities and socioeconomic inequities inside the democratic structure. Furthermore, the evidence shows how these ideologies create leaders and, as a result, deliver positive and negative consequences on American officials, despite the tremendous progress of women’s sports and the possibility for athletic women to be a great role models. The mainstream representation of these sportswomen has been susceptible to sexism and obscurity compared to men’s sports.
Conclusion
Organizations and individuals in this dominant relationship context depend greatly on language to retain their authority and leadership. Similarly, individuals have claimed that ethnic disparities in reported handling during regular contacts contribute to the public’s distrust of enforcement in high-profile officer-involved homicides. The societal concept of gender has developed in the gender division of labor, which applies to socially defined theories and strategies that specify which roles and responsibilities are acceptable for men and women. Language plays a crucial role in changing behaviors by influencing public perception and encouraging legislative activism. Evaluating the language used to debate and prove inequality raises the concern of whether it is possible or even beneficial to develop a national discourse on inequities. Language has a significant impact on how people interpret reality.
References
Camp, N. P., Voigt, R., Jurafsky, D., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2021). The thin blue waveform: Racial disparities in officer prosody undermine institutional trust in the police. Journal of personality and social psychology.
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Herren, G. (2019). Stage Review of Fences. August Wilson Journal, 1.
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Veliz, P., Zarrett, N., & Sabo, D. (2020). Keeping Girls in the Game: Factors That Influence Sport Participation. Women’s Sports Foundation.
Wróblewska, M. N. (2021). Research impact evaluation and academic discourse. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8(1), 1-12.