Foreword

Reflection on the notion of language as a primordial locus of power is as old as speech itself as attested by the emblematic “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” or, some millennia later, Aristotle’s Rhetoric (4th century BC), possibly the earliest ‘academic’ text on the subject of persuasion. In a leap forward to more contemporaneous times and concerns, works such as Fowler et al.’s Language and Control (1979), and Fairclough’s Language and Power (..