Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language Policy and Planning 149
or scientists. Noted works help standardise the language (corpus) and
gain admiration for it (status). This isolated work of individuals is sometimes
organised within offi cial academies created to support literature
production for individual languages.
However, literature is not the only source of prestige. What is admired
and emulated in speech can be what disrupts and undermines traditional
notions of correctness or formal rules of appropriateness. These transgressive
kinds of prestige confer cultural capital, the material and symbolic
resources valued by particular communities. Subversive modes of talk,
music and performance create images and behaviours that produce
community and identity for particular groups rather than any intrinsic or
objective value.
A distinctive, and controversial, category of LP relates to the links
between discourse and ideology. Some LP scholars dispute whether attitude
and ideology formation through discourse can be included under LP
at all. Discourse planning has a range of meanings. The most straightforward
refers to education to develop persuasive or assertive ways of expression,
such as to help young people participate in society and accomplish personal
goals through effective communication. In ancient Rome and Greece
rhetoric was essential preparation for lawyers, politicians, generals and
even poets and ‘expression’ has remained a central goal of schooling.
Participation in public life relies on language abilities to express opinion,
progress economically, prevent exploitation or abuse, explore identity and
make connections. Discourse planning, in its worst sense, however, means
propaganda or brain washing rather than persuasion or self-expression.
Both extremes refer to how individuals deploy persuasive talk or writing
to modify or reinforce worldview and attitudes. Advertising aims to persuade
customers to purchase or recognise and recall products, political
movements and parties engage in persuasion on policy and political philosophy.
‘Spin’ is the angle attached to information by politicians’ media
staffers; it is exemplary discourse planning because it involves a slant, or
perspective attached to events and incidents to favour particular interpretations
of the those events and incidents. Spin often aims to change conventional
or expected word meanings. We recognise a version of discourse
planning as thought-control, or brainwashing in the writings of George
Orwell: 1984 and Animal Farm. But thought control is only the most
extreme end of a continuum of persuasive language, increasingly studied
by cognitive linguists. A well-known example is George Lakoff’s analysis
of swing voters during the 2004 US presidential election, in the best-seller
Don’t Think of An Elephant (Lakoff, 2005). Adding (1) discourse planning to
(2) status, (3) corpus, (4) acquisition, (5) usage and (6) prestige planning aims
to produce a comprehensive but non-mechanistic picture of the six kinds
of activity that generate language change. These are more or less conscious,
more or less deliberate, and are rarely pursued in isolation.