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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2017

Maintaining a dominant voice: a syntactic analysis of the way power is wielded in medical editorials

Résumé

The medical profession is a powerful specialized community in western societies, with highly selective access and elite status, extensive social relevance, a strong corporate identity, and its own internal regulatory bodies. Its opinions therefore carry considerable weight, but need to be couched in such a way as to elicit agreement (from the general public, from the authorities, etc.) in order to maintain this dominant position. Among the written discourse genres whose recognized role is to express opinion, the editorial features in pride of place. This is not its only function, however: an editorial may also offer critique and advice to specific (often elite) groups or institutions in society, and hence involves power relations between the media and these other groups (Van Dijk 1998: 62). To explore how power is deployed through discourse in the medical profession, a study of the editorials which feature in the major medical journals seemed the ideal place to start. Building on our previous research into how different variants of if-conditionals in medical editorials enabled editorialists to subtly exploit syntactic resources to direct opinion (Carter-Thomas/Rowley-Jolivet 2014), in the present study we examine various other syntactic resources and formulations used to establish authority and convince the diverse readerships of the journal.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-02374164 , version 1 (21-11-2019)

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Citer

Shirley Carter-Thomas, Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet. Maintaining a dominant voice: a syntactic analysis of the way power is wielded in medical editorials. Power, persuasion and manipulation in specialised genres : providing keys to the rhetoric of professional communities, Peter Lang, pp.71 - 99, 2017, Linguistic Insights, 978-3-0343-3012-1. ⟨10.3726/b11481⟩. ⟨hal-02374164⟩
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