The Expression of Inequality in Interaction: Power, dominance, and status (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

In keeping with the profile of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series , this volume presents and discusses issues that are central to aspects of social inequality, power, dominance and status as expressed in discourse in its broadest sense. The volume aggregates research efforts of the past years, and it constitutes a point of departure for future studies. The contributions challenge the widespread assumption that concepts such as inequality, power, dominance and status are predetermined in discourse; the volume, including contributions by international scholars from various disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and social psychology rather emphasizes the co-constructedness of these concepts in ordinary discourse and thus advances the potential for insights into how aspects of inequality, power, dominance and status are both made and understood. This volume has been designed to promote recent research on a classic topic, relating discursive, cognitive and social dimensions of inequality in most of the social sciences and the humanities. The volume aims at an international readership, making this book of interest to both researchers and advanced students in linguistic pragmatics, usage-based linguistics, ethnography of speaking, sociology and social psychology. Rainer Schulze and Hanna Pishwa: The expression of inequality in interaction. Power, dominance, and status: An introduction Part I. Focus on third persons Rainer Schulze: Representing inequality in language: Words as social categorizers of experience Jennifer J. Harman, Michelle R. Kaufman, Eric Aoki, and Carlie D. Trott: Sexual network partners in Tanzania: Labels, power, and the systemic muting of women’s health and identity Jericho M. Hockett, Lora K. McGraw, and Donald A. Saucier: A “rape victim” by any other name: The effects of labels on individuals’ rape-related perceptions Andreas Langlotz and Danièle Klapproth Muazzin: Unveiling the phantom of the “Islamic takeover”: A critical, cognitive-linguistic analysis of the discursive perpetuation of an Orientalist schema Konstanze Marx: Power eliciting elements at the semantic-pragmatic interface: Data from cyberbullying and virtual character-assassination attempts Part II. Focus on speaker/author Hanna Pishwa: Powerless language: Hedges as cues for interpersonal functions John Donahue: A true authoritarian type: How fonts can facilitate positive opinions for powerful groups Anita Fetzer: We and I, and you and them: People, power and solidarity Heiko Motschenbacher: Language, normativity and power: The discursive construction of objectophilia The present paper aims to shed light on how social actors orient to sexual normativity in their talk. It relates normativity to (Foucauldian) notions of discourse and power, arguing that local linguistic negotiations of sexuality are generally shaped by a competition between dominant and marginalized discourses. The empirical section focusses on how sexual normativity is linguistically constructed in conversations related to objectophilia, a form of sexual desire that is clearly non-normative. The data consists of telephone calls from the German radio phone-in show Domian. It is shown how spea