Struggle for Power and Access to Language

This article is concerned with the relationship between textual voices and their dialogic negotiations of social semiotic power relations. First, it locates interpersonal prosodic meanings within the purview of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), treating them as concrete grammatical instances symptomatic of more abstract social systems. Next, it examines the use of modality instances in our data text, Disgraced, and discusses how the textual voices in our data, realized along the lines of subjective/objective and explicit/implicit meanings of modality, are created, maintained, and subverted by perceived social hierarchical systems of race and ethnicity. On the basis of our text analysis, we argue that struggle for social semiotic power is struggle for control of and access to particular language resources.