response on political correctness

[Svetlana Malykhina]

Dear John and Alina,
Thanks for your comments. I will not attempt to pinpoint my affiliation with any particular “political theory” authors, let alone with any of politicians. While I consider all alternative explanations, I feel it appropriate to discuss “political correctness” instances in the frame of “speech act” theory that invites us to discuss author’s intentions and perlocutive effect of the utterances. Clearly, the utterances could ”be received” ironically if there are discursive clues for such a reading, or the euphemisms can be regarded “biased” (with shift to irony, subjectivity and ambiguity) if the Cooperative principle (Grice,1975) is violated. This doesn’t mean that I try to introduce some rigid assumptions such as outdated “principles of cooperation,” and check all the utterances against these principles. Moreover, as it is well-known that Gricean maxims are adequate only for more formal style and their violation makes
 someone’s discourse particularly evaluative or emotive ( but by no means “harmful”).  
My suggestion is to put apart contexts drawn from different types of discourse to see a variety of functions of PC.  Let me hypothesize, PC could be really “harmful” in legislative documents, in the text of the Constitution and, in media coverage of ethnic/military etc. conflicts. In these types of discourses we attempt to avoid sexist language, or any other “ideological” dialect  – to not offend individuals by  the presentational manner.  That’s where the media power is closely tied to the definition of ideology given by Gramsci (1971), who considered that it is crucial to understand the subtle but pervasive forms of ideological control and manipulation of language. Foucault (1980) pointed out that the media has power to influence the “conduct” of its audience. I extrapolate this to PC, which is often a trigger for the reader. To sum up, in linguistic research interest, I would explore functions of PC in the different types of
 discourse.                            
             


      

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