Patrick Healey, Prashant Khare, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Mladen Karan, Ravi Shekhar, Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins, and Matthew Purver
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse,
June 2023.
Organisational responsibilities can bring power but also a degree of
vulnerability and exposure. This leads to divergent predictions about
the use of potentially sensitive language: power might license it,
exposure might inhibit it. Data from a large corpus of organisational
emails shows that people in positions of relative power tend to avoid
potentially sensitive words suggesting that, in at least some
circumstances, vulnerability is a more significant influence than power
in organisational language use.
Download: healey2023power.pdf